T 4.45 Delayed access to archive information

Delays regarding the recovery of archived documents may disturb or impair business processes, within the context of which an archive query is made. The large number of causes for such delays include, for example:

• obsolete archive server software,
• inadequate selection of indexing keys and search criteria when storing or browsing for archived data,
• overloaded hardware of the archive server or of involved database servers,
• delays in the network, as well as
• imbalanced ratio of storage media to drives.

A differentiation between two cases must be made regarding the last item:

• If a drive with a single storage medium that has a very large capacity is used for archiving, the response times may be very long, since only one user may access the archive at a time. Any other queries are buffered and then processed in the order of receipt.

• A large number of small storage media are used with only a few drives being available. Therefore, the data media must be switched with the corresponding frequency during queries, which causes longer response times. furthermore, small storage media reach their storage capacity limits quicker (see T 4.20 Overloaded information systems).

Delays may also occur when entering documents into the archive, for example, if the confirmation of the archiving procedure is delayed by very long transmission times in the LAN.