Agilisys Retain Data on Plasmon Archive Solution in UK

Plasmon PLC has entered a business partnership with Agilisys, a UK IT services and outsourcing providers, to provide managed archive services to public and private sector organisations throughout the UK. Using the world-class Agilisys data centre infrastructure, this new service enables customers to cost-effectively retain data on a Plasmon archive solution. With three Plasmon systems already operational at two of Agilisys’ London based data centres, customers have already subscribed to the service.

The new archive service is an extension of Agilisys’ storage service offering. The architecture of Plasmon’s Archive Appliance allows Agilisys to provide long-term data storage at a much lower cost than with traditional high performance magnetic disk systems. Because Agilisys can offer an archive with a lower service level than primary storage, archive data is up to 10 times less expensive making it ideal for infrequently accessed data.

The Plasmon Archive Appliance also provides a greener storage solution because it consumes dramatically less electricity than primary disk storage. This allows Agilisys to offer a more environmentally responsible archive service to their customers while reducing the power density within their own data centres. This is an emerging issue for many companies as they look to mitigate rapidly increasing electricity costs and address new corporate social responsibility targets.

Within days of the initial deployment, Agilisys signed up their first customers to the new archive service. This includes a medical client using the Plasmon Archive Appliance to retain patient records and a call centre archiving voice recording and call tracking information for long-term reference.

“Long term, power efficient, low cost storage is becoming increasingly critical both for our clients and for our own business,” commented David Abensour, chief technical officer at Agilisys. “The Plasmon archive delivers this for us within a mature and reliable model. Its long term retention characteristics also address the growing need to meet regulatory requirements for secure data storage. The Archive Appliance allows us to keep within our existing power footprint while continuing to grow the total amount of storage we manage. We can also reclaim large amounts of our SAN storage currently used for archiving and redeploy it under new servers instead of buying more capacity.”

“We installed two of our Enterprise Archive Appliances and one of our smaller systems at multiple Agilisys data centre sites in London,” explained David Barrett-Hague, director of business development for Plasmon. “This deployment gives customers the data retention they need while providing Agilisys with a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy. All client data on the Archive Appliance is automatically replicated to the second system at the DR facility to protect against any major site failure. The Agilisys infrastructure is very impressive and their system design provides a compelling and cost-effective service for their customers. Feedback from the first customers makes us confident that the new Agilisys archive services will be very successful.”