News

posted on 17 April 2008 10:59

With its Smart Stubbing technology Waterford's MailMeter File Archiver 2.0 can provide fast and transparent access to archived files and e-mails.

When a file or e-mail is archived a so-called stub is left behind in its original location informing the accessing application that the file has been moved to a different location in the organisation's storage infrastructure. Generally archived files and e-mails are slow to restore because left-behind stubs don't automatically link to the archived file or mail location. A fresh storage access transaction has then to be started to access the archived file.

Waterford Technologies has devised smart stubs which can be used to transparently divert the original storage access transaction to the new location. In effect they virtualise the file or mail's location and so speed up and simplify access to archived information.

Smart Stubbing is new software technology for organisations to save expensive file server storage space with three file virtualization methods to seamlessly replace entire files with tiny, intelligent links to the files that have been captured, compressed, encrypted, and de-duplicated in the MailMeter www.mailmeter.com.  File Archiver Windows-based server.

Policy-driven archiving can migrate files to the archive, leaving smart stubs behind. No user PC software agents are needed and archived files can reside on more cost-effective storage media.

There are three types of smart stub:-

- “OnDemand stubs” launch application files from the archive;
- “Dynamic stubs” automatically restore files from the archive to their original location when an application or user accesses the file;
- “Revision stubs” present a user with a choice of the versions of the file that can be restored from the archive.

Brendan Nolan, the company's CEO, said: “The volume of information growth has seen organisations rapidly expand their server environments. As a result, many have lost visibility into storage usage. They know that a high percentage of user data is duplicated, hardly ever accessed, and could easily be archived or deleted in accordance with business and regulatory requirements. MailMeter File Archiver 2.0 allows customers to automatically delete duplicated data, automatically archive non-used files to cheaper storage, and instantly access archived information for restoration and compliance.”

Brocade's StorageX file virtualisation product uses a similar technology but does not have an archiving function.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}