Hitachi Data Systems has signed a global partnership with Data Islandia to offer environmentally friendly archival data management services.

Data Islandia specialises in international archival services for sensitive digital information under elevated security and enhanced privacy and has established facilities in Iceland powered completely by geothermal and hydroelectric energy.

Through its deal with Hitachi, Data Islandia manages archived data while maintaining compliance, risk containment, governance and operational rules.

"Organisations are focused on making their data centres more efficient, but virtualising six-month old information, which is effectively digital toxic waste, is a very poor use of resources," said Sol Squire, executive member of the Board of Directors for Data Islandia.

"Instead, they should be looking to completely remove this data from the corporate network."

Analysts estimate that up to 70 per cent of data stored by organisations is more than six months old.

Although most of this data must be retained for compliance purposes, Data Islandia reckons it is generally stored inefficiently and takes up a great proportion of the available power, space and management resources.

Data Islandia will use the Hitachi Content Archive Platform as the core digital indexing and archival platform, and will utilise Hitachi's flagship storage system, the Universal Storage Platform V, for the storage of the archived data.

"Organisations are fast running out of room in their data centres due to the explosive growth of data volumes. Compounding this is the fact that stricter corporate governance controls and new regulations are creating a data management nightmare," said Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems.

Analyst firm Ovum has looked beyond the announcement to the trends that have driven it.

"Apart from the opportunity for Hitachi Data Systems to get in with a bit of 'green' messaging, this announcement highlights a couple of significant trends in the managed services sector: increased demand for data archiving services and moves to locate data centres and facilities close to locations where there are cheaper, sustainable sources of power," said Ian Brown, senior analyst at Ovum.

"The demand for data archiving and managed storage services is growing with the increase in regulatory requirements in a number of vertical markets and the need to retain data for compliance purposes."

He added: "The requirement for more data to be archived will have an impact on many organisations' power, space and management resources if it's kept in house. Traditional tape-based archiving makes for slow, inflexible retrieval of data. Hence the growing attraction of removing archived data from the corporate network and out-tasking its management to a third party."