Plasmon Intents to Virtualize the Archive Layer

Plasmon PLC announced its intentions to virtualize the archive management layer to enable organizations to better manage data growth and reduce the cost and complexity of retaining and managing data over long periods of time.

Organizations are continuing to experience explosive data storage growth while facing new demands for data retention and disposition driven by e-discovery and corporate compliance regulations. By virtualizing the archive layer customers, including IT managers will be able to leverage best-in-class archive applications and storage technologies over the data lifecycle without incurring the cost and risk associated with future data migrations.

“A leader and early innovator in the archive solutions market over the last two decades, Plasmon has helped thousands of IT customers protect their data while reducing the risk, total cost and complexity associated with actively archiving critical data storage,” said Steven Murphy, Chief Executive Officer, Plasmon. “Continuing in the tradition of innovation, 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 virtualizing 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.”

Key to this strategy is Plasmon’s Enterprise Active Archive (EAA). The EAA currently virtualizes media management of data on both on-line and off-line media. Plasmon also 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.

In the new release of the Enterprise Active Archive, the user interface has been enhanced and now enables archival virtualization by allowing disk and UDO media technologies to be used together as archive targets. It recognizes differences in service levels and combines multiple storage technologies to meet archive requirements, further helping to meet data archive and disaster recovery objectives.

Plasmon has also added a search capability to the Enterprise Active Archive that helps businesses drive efficiencies in locating information. 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 allowing greater visibility and flexibility into the data that is archived on the EAA.

Plasmon’s Enterprise Active Archive is a next-generation multi-tier archiving system designed for long term retention of fixed content data subject to governance/compliance requirements. The Plasmon EAA delivers RAID performance for archive data requiring online access, the permanence, authenticity, and portability of media for long term data retention and authenticity, and intelligent software services to deliver a highly available, highly scalable archive solution. 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.