What Data Archive Vendors Won't Tell You Before the Sale

If you're an IT manager considering a major—or even a minor—data archiving buy, there are a few things you should be sure to take into consideration. 

It turns out there are some so-called dirty little secrets that not every vendor will tell you about archiving products.

By this is meant that customers of data archive systems, along with many others within the industry—including evaluators/editors and market analysts—are often unaware of some important limitations on data archiving solutions, in particular, CAS (content-addressable storage) archives.

Vendors, naturally, are not going to volunteer much, if any, of this information. If you ask ahead of time, though, you're covered.

Bob Woolery, senior vice president of marketing at Nexsan, which makes SANs (storage area networks) and archiving packages, was our main source on this inside information.

"Where these really came out was when we started talking to customers, as they were reviewing, researching and evaluating products. We would get that look and that phrase, 'I didn't know that!'" Woolery told me. "Or, they'd say, 'Really? Tell me more about that.'"

Some of this information also comes from Nexsan customers' counterparts in the industry, Woolery said. "Other people have run into some challenges and have said, "I didn't know that,' or 'I sure would have liked to have known that before I bought the system.'"

There are five categories of "secrets": scalability, data protection, performance, data migration and energy efficiency.  Read on.

Five 'Dirty Little Secrets' to Know When Buying a Data Archive