14 DAY TRIAL // If you are not Western Digital and still want to jump in the eco-friendly bandwagon, you have to be smart enough to find an alternative. This is the case of another well known storage solution provider, Hitachi Data Systems, who has signed a partnership with Data Islandia to offer disc-based archival data management services. They have chosen Iceland just because the country is alleged to be 100 percent fueled by carbon-neutral electricity.
The partnership is offering both institutions and individuals an environmental-friendly alternative to deposit their files, which are referred to as 'digital toxic waste'. Data Islandia is known to be powered by geothermal and hydroelectric energy, and the company is willing to archive on disk the corporate data centers' digital information they are not allowed to dispose of.
According to a study conducted by Hitachi, 70 percent of an organization's data is older than half a year. "Much of this data must be retained for compliance purposes but it is generally stored inefficiently, offers very little business value stored on tape, and takes up a great proportion of the available power, space and management resources." It claims that, "by removing archived data from the corporate network and cost-effectively storing it on disk, organizations benefit from reduced power consumption and cooling, increased space, better compliance with corporate regulations and far better use of resources."
Data Islandia is taking advantage of lower operational costs, since real estate is extremely low and telecommunications and energy costs are close to none. These factors allow Hitachi and Data Islandia to provide a low-cost alternative to tape backup. "These reduced operational costs combined with Hitachi's archiving technology means that Data Islandia can offer disk-based archiving as a cost-effective alternative to tape", Hitachi says. "The benefit of this is that customers can access their archived data via a high-speed connection and use it for business intelligence, fraud prevention and other information management activities."
The core of the operation will be Hitachi's Content Archive Platform, claimed to offer a plethora of features, such as native content archiving, sophisticated policies data lifecycle management and compliance, petabyte scalability and seamless integration across other storage technologies, thanks to their virtualization capabilities.