New UK Start-Up in Archiving Software: Tarmin

Tarmin Technologies announced its entrance into the archiving software marketplace with a new and unique approach to enterprise-class active archiving and next-generation intelligent storage platforms optimised for secondary storage environments.  The company, formed by a seasoned team of storage and active archiving experts, is driven by the market need for dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of retaining, managing and securely accessing unstructured data.

 
In separate news, the company unveiled its flagship product, GridBank that utilises industry standard, heterogeneous server and storage hardware to form a grid-based active archive and intelligent, scalable storage software solution. The solution enables effective long-term, fixed-content data preservation on cost-effective secondary storage tiers – such as low-cost SATA hard disk drives and tape libraries. A high-performance, high-availability and highly scalable solution, GridBank satisfies any organisation’s regulatory compliance requirement by ensuring secure, long-term data retention and fast search and retrieval of valuable business records.
 
IDC, one of the world’s leading IT industry analyst firms, forecasts the archival software market to continue to grow rapidly and reach $2.81 billion by 2012 up from $1 billion in 2007 (IDC, May 2008).
 
“Tarmin is positioned to change how enterprises manage the life cycle of file-based information”, said Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager storage software at IDC. “GridBank delivers a comprehensive active archival software and intelligent storage foundation in one solution.  With GridBank, end users will no longer need to purchase and deploy several point products from multiple vendors.”
 
“We established Tarmin because we have seen the problems enterprise IT experiences with the high cost of primary storage, the massive growth in unstructured file-based data, the multitude of government regulations regarding data retention and the tremendous pressure to manage data cost effectively,” said Shahbaz Ali, founder and CEO of Tarmin. “GridBank solves these problems by allowing organisations to take a more logical strategy to their data management, to more easily move data to extremely economical secondary storage tiers, and to provide a foundation for a sound and transparent compliance policy.”
           
Tarmin Led by Storage and Archival Veterans
Tarmin is led by experts with extensive experience in the areas of active archiving, highly scalable data storage solutions, distributed clustered file systems, and data security.  Tarmin’s senior management team includes Shahbaz Ali, founder and CEO, a former executive at Mastercard International, Mondex and Lucent; Eric Herzog, vice president of marketing and sales, who has held vice president of marketing and sales positions at several storage companies including, IBM, Maxtor and Topio; Karl Edwards, vice president of business development, who previously held senior sales management positions at Cable and Wireless and Energis; and Steve Simpson, co-founder and vice president of engineering, who has held senior engineering management roles at Nissan and Mondex.
 
Tarmin has received its seed round venture funding from Create Partners Limited, IQ Capital Partners, and NorthStar Equity Investors.
 
“Tarmin embodies the same qualities of our portfolio companies that have grown into major players,” said Boyd Mulvey, chief executive at Create Partners.  “The company is focused on a large, high-growth market and has built a product driven by customer needs. The team has proven its ability to execute by having GridBank encompass a comprehensive, active archiving and intelligent storage software feature set in one unified solution.  We are confident that Tarmin will become a substantial player in the active archiving and next-generation intelligent storage arena.”
 
Active Archiving
According to the Taneja Group, active archiving is an archiving approach that leverages disk instead of tape-to-store archived data, keeping the data on-line and searchable for e-discovery, governance and compliance, business analysis, and other purposes.  Some active archiving platforms, such as GridBank, allow the integration of multiple media types, including disk, optical, and tape, to enable tiering within the archive itself.  Active archiving cuts discovery costs by an order of magnitude relative to tape-based only archiving, and also allows a much higher percentage of data currently stored on primary disk to be moved to the archive. Unlike tape-only archiving products, data is still accessible on-line, resulting in cost savings relative to primary storage. Technologies like clustered or grid storage, storage capacity optimisation, and SATA disk can make active archiving very cost-competitive with conventional tape-based archiving, while enabling cost-effective discovery and offering faster, more reliable recovery of archive data.
 
Tarmin is headquartered in Ongar, United Kingdom, with North American offices in Palo Alto, California.