It turns out there are some so-called dirty little secrets that not every vendor will tell you about archiving products. They fall into five categories of "secrets": scalability, data protection, performance, data migration and energy efficiency.

Dirty Little Secret No. 1:  Scalability. CAS (content-addressable storage) archives have a hard limit on the number of objects that can be stored. 

This is a very different metric from the total amount of usable storage a system might have.

"What nobody tells you is that as you grow the number of your stored objects, you're going to run into a few challenges," said Bob Woolery, senior vice president of marketing at Nexsan, which makes SANs (storage area networks) and archiving packages. "Let's say you have 5 terabytes of space. You say, 'Great, when I run out of 5TB, I'll buy 5TB more.' And you purchase it based on that. But the other constraint is your object count. 

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