Phoenix has today launched its active Archive as a Service (AaaS) offering, the UK’s first interactive cloud-based archive service to also be fully integrated into Phoenix’s IT Disaster Recovery as a Service offering. 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.

“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,” explained Chris Coulson, DRaaS product manager at Phoenix.

“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 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. 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 disruption.

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 three diverse Phoenix UK owned datacentres and is delivered via a blend of Hewlett Packard, Scality Ring & NTP technologies.

“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,” Osborne added. “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’.

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