Features - Storage Innovations:

ARCHIVAS UNVEILS BREAKTHROUGH FOR ARCHIVING FIXED CONTENT

Archivas Inc, an emerging leader of scalable, open platform, archive solutions for fixed content, announced its official launch at the Storage Decisions show in New York City. The company, which has received $6 million in Series A venture capital funding, had industry experts buzzing with the launch of its Archivas Cluster (ArC) solution and the introduction of its world-class management team.

ArC is an object-based file system designed specifically to store fixed content, such as medical images, voice recordings, satellite images and e-mail. ArC is unique in its ability to deliver a single fixed content repository that can be shared among multiple applications. In addition, ArC offers highly scalable online storage, heterogeneous systems support, the highest levels of reliability and availability, complete regulatory compliance and the lowest cost of ownership available on the market today.

Archivas' object-based management approach is unique in that it stores a file, its metadata (information about the file), and file policies together. As a result, ArC stores and retrieves archive objects, not volumes or files. Customers have the flexibility of changing applications or system platforms over time without impacting their ability to store and retrieve fixed content stored in the archives. ArC also enables adherence to regulatory and corporate compliance policies such as file retention, content authentication, data shredding and the multiple levels of security necessary in mission critical enterprise environments. In addition, Archivas certifies ArC with industry-standard hardware platforms and delivers a fully integrated solution, thus ensuring that customers have the greatest flexibility to implement large-scale archives.

"Today's enterprise archive storage requirements demand a solution that offers scalability, openness and simplified policy management delivered in a cost effective manner," said Andres Rodriguez, founder and CEO of Archivas. "Traditional solutions cannot meet these criteria without serious limitations. Archivas was created to fill this void in the market."

Continued Rodriguez, "Archivas provides the ideal solution. Our software delivers a single online fixed content repository, accessible by multiple applications, scaling to petabytes of capacity. It is easy to implement and automatically manages the content based on user policies."

Prior to Archivas, users had two unappealing alternatives when faced with archive requirements. Store fixed content to tape, or purchase expensive proprietary solutions. Tape, while inexpensive, offers slow data access times, and due to its sequential nature cannot store metadata and policies effectively. As a result, as an archive grows, it presents an increasing amount of administrative overhead. With proprietary disk based systems data is not tied to physical removable media and thus captive to that hardware system.

Government regulations require long-term retention and authenticity. Removable media such as tape is especially vulnerable to mishandling and corruption, while expensive, high performance block-based online storage systems lack the necessary policies such as WORM (write-once, read-many) guarantees or file authentication to appropriately manage fixed content, and are typically not as cost-effective.

"This technology arrives at an opportune time; just as the demand for fixed content storage capacity is high and continues to grow, the limitations of traditional archive solutions are apparent," said Peter Gerr, analyst of emerging technologies and market trends for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "New government regulations and increasingly competitive market pressures have converged to underscore the importance of selecting long-term storage solutions for fixed-content that offer secure access and easy scalability, and are relatively inexpensive. In order to meet both business objectives and regulatory requirements, fixed content must be stored in an online digital archive that is scalable, reliable, and highly available and cost effective."

NASA's Small Business Innovation Research Program considers the Archivas solution a promising technology, prompting the Goddard Space Flight Center to install a Beta test version to further explore its capabilities. Said Curt Tilmes of System Engineering at NASA. "Fixed content archiving is increasingly important. I look forward to learning more about ArC and its ability to help our organization store, manage, protect and retrieve data"

"There is a clear, emerging need for a class of software solution dedicated to fixed content archive management. The approach taken by Archivas is promising because it hits on all of the key requirements for this new category: an open architecture, deep scalability and automated management," said Brad O'Neill, senior analyst at Taneja Group.