Posts by Julian Cook

Mimosa adds files to archive cocktail

More file types does not make this unified archiving

Mimosa certainly have a competitive email, document and file archiving solution, but it's a stretch to say that they enable a unified archiving strategy. An archiving solution stack that does not provide the ingestion software or platform services to address structured data i.e historical data from databases, data warehouses or log files, is simply not a unified solution. The unified archiving platform nirvana is a single platform, with integrated technologies, that enable the efficient storage, management and search of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. You'd expect vendors in the traditional archiving space to be partnering with the database archiving vendors in the near future to address this challenge and opportunity.

Is green storage a dead end?

A third way

There’s no doubt that if you stop innovating, in any sphere of technology or science, you will at some point hit a brick wall and the laws of diminishing returns will kick-in. So Steve Denegri is right, somewhat; if you take a 2 dimensional approach and exhaust the potential of more efficient kit and/or more effective virtualization, at some point you’ll need to start buying more servers, more storage and more juice.

However there is a third way; how about actually managing your data more efficiently and effectively so you don’t need all that horsepower in the first place. Whether it’s realising that the kitten videos in your inbox (as a previous post mentioned) don’t need to be backed up 6 times, or more seriously implementing archiving strategies that recognize 85% of data in production databases is inactive and could be relocated to highly compressed archive stores. I’d contend that new and under utilised data management technologies that allow you to store 30x-40x more historical data on existing infrastructure can have a serious impact on power consumption. A new innovation that should at least be considered before we start building those new datacenters and power stations.