Permabit and ZL Marry De-Dupe and File System Virtualization

Permabit Technology Corporation and ZL Technologies, Inc. (ZL), in email archiving for compliance, e-discovery and storage management, today announced their technology partnership. The Permabit Enterprise Archive Data Center series solution has been certified with all of ZL’s products, including ZL Unified Archive software, zDiscovery, zCompliance, zStorage, and zSecurity. The joint solution combines the ZL application grid with the Permabit storage grid to form an efficient and scalable architecture that delivers low-cost, high performance data retention for the long term. Offering advanced e-discovery capabilities with support for over 1000 file types, the solution will be particularly attractive to heavily regulated businesses such as those in the legal, financial services, banking, insurance and healthcare sectors.
 
“Many companies are realizing too late that a vast storehouse of backup tapes or optical platters is not an adequate solution for archiving data, especially in the face of increasingly frequent e-discovery mandates. Disk-based solutions with poor search capabilities fare only slightly better,” observed George Crump, president and senior analyst at Storage Switzerland. “The search and operational efficiencies of the Permabit and ZL solution render it a clear alternative to legacy approaches.”
 
In the joint solution, Permabit provides a highly scalable disk-based archiving platform that perfectly integrates behind ZL’s highly scalable compute grid residing at the application layer. Because ZL incorporates a virtual file system architecture, Permabit presents directly to any node in the ZL application environment, regardless of scale. This combination of high-scale vaulting with an infinitely scalable grid application means that Permabit and ZL together can provide enterprise customers with unprecedented cost savings in their end-to-end archiving deployments.
 
The Permabit and ZL solution is the first to marry file system virtualization with complementary deduplication technologies in an end-to-end grid architecture that is self-healing at the storage, file index, and primary server levels; reduces storage overhead for long term data retention; and enables server and storage resources to be dynamically adjusted for each task. ZL’s precision search features enable users to find the exact results that are being sought, including Boolean, user alias, wildcard, category, proximity, and fuzzy searches across email, attachments and file system documents.
 
“Permabit and ZL Technologies offer industry leading ROI for optimizing long-term data retention. Our partnership is a natural fit, as together we are able to deliver an end-to-end, server-to-storage data retention solution that maximizes system performance and searchability while minimizing costs every step of the way,” said Mike Ivanov, vice president of marketing, Permabit. “I’m excited about the value proposition we’re able to bring our customers who are struggling with the ‘perfect storm’ happening in enterprise data centers right now— unstructured data growing at unprecedented rates, government regulations for maintaining data becoming more numerous and stringent, and the tightening economy making it more challenging to cover the associated costs.”

“The current boom in litigation following the financial crisis and the accompanying rise in e-discovery procedures is clearly taxing corporate systems and legal departments. As current leading vendors’ solutions crumble in the wake of significant increases in email volume and search requirements, the joint ZL-Permabit solution proves to be the only one in the market today that can scale to meet the needs for robust search across petabyte-scale, multi-billion-volume archives,” says Stephen Chan, vice president of business development, ZL Technologies, Inc. “The combined GRID architecture is unique and significantly reduces overhead costs while strategically allocating available computing power to eliminate the need to sacrifice performance due to increases in work load, making the TCO of both products the lowest in the market.”