BridgeHead Software has released an archive tool to help businesses manage the increasing volume of data associated with Microsoft SharePoint Server resources. It cuts the amount of data held on tier 1 storage, with the knock-on effect of speeding backup and restore operations, according to the firm.

BH ShareStore, available immediately, can automatically move inactive SharePoint data from primary storage systems onto a variety of secondary media. However, it does this transparently, so that users still have access to archived information.

"As much as 70 per cent of the content of a typical SharePoint system can consist of rarely accessed older items, including early versions of documents that quickly pile up as teams of users collaborate on document creation," said BridgeHead Software chief executive Tony Cotterill.

BH ShareStore contains a policy engine that lets IT department set rules governing when data should be archived, and whether archived data is simply deleted or replaced with a placeholder so that it can be retrieved again at a later date. Policies can also be defined to meet corporate governance and compliance regulations.

"You would typically want to keep access to older information in SharePoint, but perhaps not if it is older than the tenth or eleventh version of a document, " Cotterill said. With this redundant information removed, IT departments have less live information on the SharePoint Server to worry about backing up.

Archived data can be moved to any secondary storage that looks like a disk, according to Cotterill, enabling the standard edition of BH ShareStore to be used as a simple point solution.

However, the Enterprise version of the software comes with BridgeHead's Data Repository tool which manages access to secondary storage. This can store the data on other devices such as tape and optical media, and can also maintain multiple copies across different media for redundancy.

BH ShareStore is licensed according to the number of SharePoint users, and costs approximately £25 per seat, which falls to about £10 per seat for 1,000 users, according to Cotterill.