News

posted on 21 May 2008 22:22

---

Enterprises' ability to cope with rampant data growth and reduce the costs of keeping long-term data will be enhanced if archive management was virtualized according to Plasmon. An achive product update prepares the way for this.

Plasmon sells archiving appliances that combine hard drives and optical drives and provide 30-year plus data retention capablities.

In Plasmon's view businesses and their IT managers cannot necessarily use best-in-class archive applications and storage technologies over the long-term data lifecycle because enterprise content management (ECM) and document management software has to deal directly with individual archive product's media, policy and data management. As archive technologies change this incurs costs and directly-managed storage migrations. It also limits archive technology choices.

Plasmon's idea is that it would be much better if ECM and document management software dealt with a virtualized archive management software layer.

Plasmon’s Enterprise Active Archive (EAA) currently virtualises media management of data on both online (disk) and offline (optical - UDO) media. The company will be virtualizing the policy and data management integration with enterprise content managers and document management applications. With this new release, Plasmon is making infrastructure changes to the EAA in preparation for future product enhancements that deliver on its virtualization strategy.

Steven Murphy, Plasmon's CEO, said: “Plasmon will deliver solutions that enable archives to become independent of the underlying storage devices and applications to help customers simplify the long term retention and disposition of data. By virtualising the archive layer, we are providing customers with archive choices that allow them to choose the right architecture for their environment– options from best-in-class archive technologies integrated into one solution for the first time.”

In the new release of the Enterprise Active Archive product, the user interface has been enhanced and now enables archival virtualization by allowing RAID-protected disk and UDO media to be used together as archive targets. It recognises differences in service levels and combines multiple storage technologies to meet archive requirements. Plasmon says this better helps to meet data archive and disaster recovery objectives.

An EAA search capability has also been added that locates information more efficiently. Plasmon has aligned the file system search functionality directly with the media assigned to the EAA. Instead of a search request choosing media at random to search, the EAA aggregates requests together and then searches the media in sequential order.

Future enhancements to the EAA will further simplify the archive process enabling intelligence-based archive systems that work with multiple technologies as one virtualized storage pool.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}