
230 The Green and Virtual Data Center
8.6.1 Archiving for Compliance and General Data Retention
Data archiving is often perceived as a solution for compliance; however,
archiving can be used for many other purposes as well, including general
data footprint reduction, to boost performance and enhance routine data
maintenance and data protection. Archiving can be applied to structured
databases data, semistructured email data and attachments, and unstruc-
tured file data. Key to deploying an archiving solution is having insight into
what data exists along with applicable rules and policies to determine what
can be archived, for how long, in how many copies, ...