Analysis

posted on 30 June 2008 08:04

Once upon a time archive provider Plasmon had a RAID product line. It's come back in another guise as part of Plasmon's new NetArchive product.

Plasmon's own RAID product line was unceremoniusly dumped when the firm underwent a financial and management restructuring. Now a RAID product has come back, courtesy of NetApp, with Plasmon's software providing a two-tiered storage capability with online disk and online optical archival UDO drives - which can be taken off-site.

The relationship with NetApp was announced  last week. The new NetArchive ¹ product integrates NetApp RAID technologies with Plasmon’s Archive Appliance and data management software to allow customers to provision data within NetArchive according to its unique storage requirements. It's policy-driven wth data moving automatically betweeen the NetApp storage and the archival drives.

Plasmon CEO Steven Murphy said: “NetArchive is a key step toward the realization of Plasmon’s strategy to simplify the archive process through virtualization. NetArchive revolutionizes our customers’ approach to archiving by delivering an intelligence-based system behind a single storage node. The NetArchive leverages appropriate storage technologies to balance capacity, performance, and storage costs against the legal and business value of data and improves operational efficiencies while meeting customer requirements for a robust disaster recovery strategy.”

This is reminiscent of SGI's InfiniteStorage Filesystem which transparently moves data between different storage tiers, including tape. That's to cope with multiple servers needing access to vast amounts of data; it's a way of getting over capacity problems in storing the whole lot on online drives. NetArchive is more focussed on archiving data for long-term storage and compliance reasons.

Plasmon has Terri McClure, an ESG analyst, stating: “Customers can no longer afford to deal with the complexity associated with the morass of solutions most vendors offer to move persistent data to secondary, tertiary, and off-site storage tiers. IT professionals want a virtualized archive solution to manage data for business and regulatory requirements with multiple price, performance, and retention choices. Plasmon NetArchive enables just that solution.”

It's interesting that the NetApp kit is characterised as RAID storage and not FC or iSCSI SAN storage or filer storage. All of these can be used by the way. The door is open for Plasmon, in theory, to put other suppliers' online drive arrays behind its software. Is the firm knocking on EMC's door for example, or IBM's or HP's?

It will also be interesting to see how Plasmon's archive software develops as the firm competes against other archival software providers such as Mimosa and Waterford Technologies.

NetArchive is available immediately through Plasmon and certified Plasmon resellers.

^{1. Full size diagram here.}

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}