Features - Storage Innovations:

PERMABIT UNLEASHES NEXT GEN. OF CONTENT ADDRESSED STORAGE

Permabit, a software company that offers safe, scalable content addressed storage, introduced Permeon, a storage solution that requires no changes to existing applications and scales from workgroup to enterprise levels. The software can reduce storage capacity needs by up to 95 percent and runs on standard non-proprietary servers, significantly lowering total cost of ownership (TCO) and offering savings of up to 50 percent over competitive CAS offerings.

The Cambridge-based company is also naming Randall P. Seidl as CEO.

Because of Permeon's scalability, easy integration with existing IT environments, and compelling TCO, CAS is now available to workgroup and mid-size environments as well as enterprise environments. Customers can start with an entry configuration and add storage servers one at a time, purchasing just the capacity needed.

CAS technology gives a unique content address to each piece of stored data based on actual content. This address enables data coalescence, where only changed data is saved, thus reducing storage capacity needs and lowering costs.

"Companies are struggling to cope with enterprise data volumes that are growing more than 70 percent per year," explained Steve Kenniston of The Enterprise Storage Group. "Object based storage is an emerging storage technology ideal for storing high volumes of data such as document images or medical records. Permeon is a second generation product that provides an economical, long-term records storage solution and integrates with existing applications."

Permeon Ushers In The Next Generation Of CAS

Permeon offers all of the benefits of first generation CAS products and can be deployed with existing applications via standard NFS and CIFS interfaces. Configurations scale from workgroup to enterprise and are based on affordable off-the-shelf standard hardware platforms. In addition, Permeon provides sub-file level coalescence, eliminating unwanted data duplication, for more efficient storage.

What Permeon Customers Say

"The Surgical Planning Laboratory (SPL) at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston stores vast quantities of CAT scan and MRI data. The integrity of our research results depends on protecting this data so that we have ready access to it into the future," commented Ron Kikinis, SPL director. "The Permeon solution is cost-effective, and gives us excellent disaster recovery options."

"The Permabit solution addresses issues of vital concern to us. Backup and reference data normally targeted for high cost tape can now be kept readily available and secure," said Jack Costanza, director of IT at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.

"At photo.net, we store very high resolution photographs for serious amateur photographers to share online. Therefore, we must store and retrieve quickly very high volumes of data," explained Rajeev Surati, chairman and founder of photo.net. "Permeon is the only scalable, economical reference data storage solution. We evaluated other storage offerings from EMC and NetApp, but they could not meet our requirements to add storage capacity as we need it, at an affordable price."

Easy Integration

Integration with competitive CAS solutions requires costly changes to a customer's environment. Permeon is compatible with existing applications, so that no changes are required. With its automated system management, storage servers can be added or removed without disrupting service.

From Workgroup To The Enterprise

Scaling in other CAS offerings is limited and inflexible. Permeon solves this challenge, scaling from 1.6 TB to 40 TB useable capacity and up to 450GB per hour.

Reduced Storage Capacity Needs

Permeon excels in data intensive applications that typically consume large amounts of storage space, such as email archiving, document management, backup and recovery, and storing reference information. Through its unique CAS technology and efficient data coalescence, Permeon uses a fraction of the space required by primary disk storage or traditional secondary storage such as tape or optical.

Lower TCO

Permeon users can take advantage of decreasing disk prices to meet the need for a more robust, accessible nearline storage solution. This highly scalable architecture is based on off-the-shelf hardware components, allowing Permeon to offer CAS storage priced for small and medium-sized environments.

Availability

A Permeon storage system consists of Permeon software on a cluster of networked storage servers, portal servers and a web-based management console. Permeon solutions are available on qualified hardware configurations through selected channel partners. Offerings are available for high volume archival, backup and recovery, and reference information applications. Pricing starts at $20 per GB of storage capacity.

Meeting Regulatory Compliance Needs

Permabit plans to introduce an option to enable compliance with emerging financial, healthcare, and defense industry regulations, such as SEC Rule 17a-4, HIPAA, and Sarbanes-Oxley, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, all of which require enterprises to maintain records permanently or for many years.