Our 3M project uses Optim to perform Legacy Application Retirement and Archiving. We've been working this project for almost 4 years now and we've made some interesting observations. I wanted to share some of those details and see if I could get feedback from what others have experienced with their archiving projects. Replies to any of the following numbered items would be welcomed. 

These numbers have been rounded off for simplicity. 

1. We have reviewed/processed over 1000 Applications for retirement in the last 4 years.  
2. We have discovered that less than 30% of those applications actually require archiving.
3. 65% of our archives are documents! 
4. 35% of our archives are actual table data. 
5. We do NOT typically ingest documents into Optim AF's. 
6. For the 35% of table data that was ingested into Optim AF, we were only able to get a 3:1 compression ratio. This was due to the interestingly large number of binary, blob, clob, etc.. (already compressed data sources). So the industry norm of 5:1 compression really didn't pan out for us. 
7. We processed 1.5 applications per week over that 4 year period. Avg. 
   • ^{_{Note: some apps took over a year while others were completed in less than 2 hrs. end to end.}} 
8. Shortest Retention Duration: 1 year
9. Longest (non-perm) Retention Duration: 80 years
10. Avg Retention Duration: 8.6 years

The most time consuming factor with archiving is not the technology or the data. It's the compliance, regulations, people, and paperwork.   ;-)

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Danny Lankford
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