Phoenix launches active Archive as a Service (AaaS)

Phoenix has launched its active Archive as a Service (AaaS), the UK’s first interactive cloud-based Archive service to also be fully integrated into Phoenix’s IT DR as a Service offering (DRaaS). The active Archive as a Service will provide organisations of all sizes, with a resilient and economic data storage solution that also remains fully accessible and available for users to search, access and retrieve their archived data.

Chris Coulson, DRaaS Product Manager at Phoenix explains why the service has been developed:
“With data growing faster than many organisations can manage, our customers are finding it difficult to not only store data economically but to also backup and recover in time to meet business expectations – especially when using the traditional, tape-based approach to protecting data.

Whilst most firms are simply buying more and more storage, the data growth is actually having a far wider negative impact on storage related issues, with backup and overall recovery time objectives increasingly becoming unachievable as a result of sheer volume of data. Our Archive as a Service solution delivers significant improvements in all of these areas.”

Phoenix believes that most data growth is being driven by so-called unstructured content which makes up 80% of stored data. Of that unstructured content 80% is inactive after 72 hours, but cannot be deleted for practical, legal or compliance reasons. It is likely that only 2% of this data will ever need to be accessed again, but nobody knows which 2% that will be! With Archive as a Service, Phoenix has recognised that this places significant pressure on IT departments to store increasingly bigger data sets, while still providing acceptable user performance and rapid recovery times in the event of data loss, or a system, or datacentre disaster.

Mike Osborne, Managing Director of Business Continuity at Phoenix commented:
“The rate of data growth is outpacing cost reductions in primary storage. IT departments are having to continually request further investment in a storage solution that was typically designed to cater for three to five years of data growth. But that’s only part of the story, we are also seeing that firms simply can’t recover quickly enough – many now need sub 24 hour recovery and there is simply too much data to achieve these targets. Our customers need an alternative to what’s currently on the market that delivers; reduced primary storage costs, reduced recovery times; whilst losing none of the functionality and accessibility of local storage. Archive as a Service meets those needs and gives our customers the added benefits of integration with our existing, award-winning Phoenix DR as a Service capabilities.”

The new service is delivered from 3 diverse Phoenix UK owned datacentres and is delivered via a unique blend of Hewlett Packard, Scality Ring & NTP technologies. These technologies when combined with the well-established Phoenix network and existing IT disaster recovery and data protection infrastructure enables Phoenix to deliver cost savings on production storage and improvement on data management and recovery.

Mike Osborne, Managing Director of Business Continuity at Phoenix concludes:
“Taking advantage of Phoenix’s economies of scale and its decades of IT industry experience, active Archive as a Service will enable business of all sizes to realise all the benefits of archive, without the significant capital expenditure normally associated with a solution of its type. With the other benefits we have crafted-in, this is probably the biggest single ‘no-brainer’ of a service we have launched in the 25 Years we have been offering services’.