In times when cost becomes an issue there is a new focus on the cost of providing basic infrastructure type services, and one of these is archiving.

Enterprises are being forced by various circumstances mostly driven by compliance legislation to archive increasing amounts of data, at the same time some of their existing digital archives are frequently on out of date fragile technology, and relatively inaccessible.

The storage industry has been working since 2003 on addressing these issues and now has released a new standard and new products that allow interoperability between their previous proprietary products and a method to update old obsolete formats.

This together with the usual roundup of industry announcements can be found in the December Monthly Technology Brief.