Organizations today share an underlying business problems like storing huge volumes of fixed-content, or persistent, data and preserving this data for the long haul. Current archive practices that are based on tape and which think of backup and archive as being one and the same or, worse yet, intermix archive data with mission-critical data on primary storage systems, are inherently flawed. Organizations that don't have sound strategies in place for storing fixed content today face serious IT and business consequences over time, including high IT costs (both CAPEX and OPEX), potentially hefty regulatory penalties and lost revenue as a result of downtime or missed business opportunity.

To put this in some perspective, according to recent ESG Research,1 total worldwide digital archive capacity is on track to surpass 27,000 petabytes-or 27 exabytes-in 2010. That's approximately triple today's archive capacity levels and more than 10 times 2005 levels. That's a whole.