Nearline Archiving

The use of data as well as the usage frequency of the data is a constantly changing process. Data which is used more often can be distinguished from the one which is not very frequently used data and so it does not require being stored on high-performance storage devices which are expensive. This is where we see a constant growth in demand of high-capacity storage processes like nearline archiving but which are cost efficient yet highly reliable. Online archiving is also an option which offers faster and better access to important data and also allows more disk space saving without affecting the performance.

What exactly is nearline archiving?

Nearline archiving is basically a traditional method of data storage which comprises of moving data to a media which is slower, say for example optical jukeboxes or robotic tapes. But one thing to be worth noting is that though retrieving data under this method is slower it is still faster if you compare it to offline archiving which is even slacker. This is so because the former is not a manual process.

Nearline archiving is a multi-step process which first compresses the data and then moves it to a nearline storage device. When someone wants to retrieve a certain data which has been thus archived, there is an inherent time lag which occurs, during which the HSM first tries to find the location of the file/data and then instructs the device to load it from the right media. After it is loaded, it is decompressed and made available. To benefit from nearline systems or SAP BW performance, visit activedata.co.uk!