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The advantages of a Vendor Neutral Archive

16 May 2018 – By Derk-Jan Boon, Chief Innovation Officer at TTNL

Despite the tremendous developments in the area of storage technologies, the management of data has become ever more complex. Due to the different types of data and the phases of the life-cycle in which data finds itself there is no one uniform storage platform that offers a solution.

Reduce the costs of the operational management of storage with Vendor Neutral Archive

In practice 5/6 of the total costs of data storage are caused by operational management (OPEX) while the purchase of hardware only amounts to 1/6 (CAPEX) of the TCO. A ‘cognitive’ data management strategy such as the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) can dramatically simplify the data management, reduce costs and risks and tremendously increase the productivity for users and administrators.

For whom is a Vendor Neutral Archive or Active Archive solution of interest?

An Active Archive environment is extremely interesting for the complex and critical data environments for which long storage periods apply, such as for hospitals and government agencies. The larger the volume of (unstructured) data that an organization has to manage the more interesting the solution becomes. This not only concerns the healthcare sector but also areas such as the media industry, streaming services, laboratories, camera security companies etc.

Challenges for organizations with large volumes of unstructured data

The extreme growth of unstructured data creates major challenges for IT departments. Frequently, along with fast availability and performance guarantees, reducing the costs for archiving are challenges that organizations run up against.

Healthcare and government agencies have to archive certain data, for example, for up to 100 years (!) even though the data is not or hardly ever used. You want to store this data in a more cost efficient manner but keep it available and traceable, which is perfectly possible with Vendor Neutral Archive. By managing the data cross-platform via a central information layer, irrespective of the type of underlying storage, you retain control over your data and the data streams. Furthermore, data protection and replication is far less labour intensive, just as with the implementation of changes due to new legislation such as GDPR.

This makes data management a lot easier so that you can make savings on both storage and management costs!