Tarmin GridBank 1.5 Archiving Plaform

Tarmin Technologies, provider of active archive, object-based storage, information lifecycle management (ILM), and storage software optimised for secondary tiered deployments, announced GridBank 1.5. Designed to substantially lower an organisation’s storage and data management Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), GridBank 1.5 boasts a number of significant new features. Among these are support for Microsoft SharePoint, 64-bit editions of GridBank for Linux and Windows Server 2008, e-discovery and search for storage resources outside of the GridBank environment, a web-based management console, and much more.

 
“GridBank 1.5’s innovative design will completely alter the management paradigm for SharePoint”, said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. “Leveraging its robust encryption, enterprise-strength secure user access control, seamless SharePoint integration, and strong administrative capabilities, GridBank will ensure complete data security and data integrity for SharePoint deployments, while substantially lowering the costs of SharePoint. GridBank 1.5 extends Tarmin’s industry leading position in the active archiving market with a solution that provides easy, online access to any kind of unstructured data.”
 
GridBank 1.5 Overview
GridBank 1.5 brings enhanced high-performance and high-availability at reduced TCO by automating storage and data management via a policy-based framework, providing effective long-term, fixed-content data preservation on considerably lower-cost secondary storage. GridBank 1.5 cuts CAPEX and OPEX by using cost-effective heterogeneous, industry-standard server and storage platforms to form a grid-based active archive for SharePoint and file-based environments that is scalable to petabytes (PB) of capacity (1PB is the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text) and billions of files. GridBank 1.5 also helps meet regulatory and compliance needs; accelerates e-discovery, content search, and retrieval; and delivers transparent, secure access to SharePoint and file-based data.
 
“Following on the early success of GridBank’s initial release, we are delivering a number of strong enhancements in version 1.5,” said Shahbaz Ali, founder and CEO of Tarmin. “With GridBank 1.5, customers will have easy and secure access to vast file-based and SharePoint information stores; powerful e-discovery, search, and data retrieval; and the extensive scalability needed for today’s incredibly rapid data growth. GridBank 1.5 delivers a solution that substantially improves data and storage management, lowers storage costs, and minimises compliance and regulatory risks.”
 
New features in GridBank 1.5 include:

• Seamless integration with SharePoint, supporting both Microsoft Office Share Point Server (MOSS) 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0.
• Policy management automation with extensive templating for more comprehensive SharePoint and file-based data policy-based management and storage. Templates speed GridBank deployment; administrators can also create custom templates for when new server resources are brought on-line.
• Support for over 500 file formats, substantially broadening GridBank index, search, and e-discovery.
• 64-bit versions of GridBank compatible with Linux and Windows Server 2008.
• Web-based management console to deliver enhanced access and flexibility to GridBank’s extensive management features.
• E-discovery, content indexing, and search for storage resources not migrated/archived into the GridBank infrastructure.
• Support for the Representational State Transfer (REST) industry-standard protocol to allow other applications to communicate with GridBank. GridBank also support for NFS, CIFS, HTTP, WebDAV, FTP and a number of other industry-standard protocols.
• Data classification reporting for storage resources not migrated/archived into the GridBank infrastructure. Included in the reporting capabilities of GridBank 1.5 are file type, usage analysis, capacity consumption, file aging, and a number of other important parameters.

“GridBank 1.5 adds several important features to its already robust set of capabilities, particularly comprehensive SharePoint support,” said Adam Dobson, Sales Director Orien5, a Tarmin authorised channel partner. “With GridBank’s all-encompassing solution for active archival, CAS, and ILM, the need to install several different products is eliminated. We are extremely pleased with GridBank’s ability to deliver our customers such a complete active archiving solution, while significantly reducing our customers’ storage CAPEX and OPEX.”
 
GridBank 1.5 SharePoint Optimisation
GridBank 1.5 provides seamless, business-rule driven, item-level to global-level archiving for SharePoint with integrated full content index and search. With SharePoint data volumes increasing exponentially, companies can quickly run out of valuable SQL server space. But, by automatically archiving SharePoint data to GridBank, IT can delay the deployment of additional SQL servers, realising significant savings in license fees and in capacity acquisition (by migrating data to more affordable secondary storage), and reducing the storage footprint of the SharePoint datasets through single instancing, compression, and thin provisioning. GridBank can archive individual SharePoint servers or a company’s entire SharePoint infrastructure, without limiting the end-users’ ability to use SharePoint.
 
Specifically designed to ensure the compliant retention of all SharePoint records, GridBank 1.5 helps organisations conform to legal, compliance, and regulatory requirements. GridBank assists in automatically enforcing and monitoring of corporate policies and procedures related to appropriate usage, governance, and privacy of data, by allowing easy discovery and review of the company’s SharePoint sites.
 
By automatically archiving and tracking SharePoint datasets, GridBank 1.5 ensures information is captured, and all archives are kept current. Through the preservation of document metadata – such as author, timestamp, and version history – all content adheres to stringent compliance regulations. Additionally, GridBank combines ID-centric security with Active Directory integration and data encryption to insure data is accessed only by users with appropriate security.
 
GridBank 1.5 allows for policies to be templated so that SharePoint servers and file servers in a department can have the same policies assigned, while another department can have different policies for their SharePoint and file servers. The flexibility in GridBank’s policy engine allows for either global or very granular policy setting across the company’s SharePoint and file server deployments, giving administrators ultimate flexibility to set policies as each individual or set of resources, requires. In addition, other functions such as search and e-discovery, single instancing, or encryption can be applied across a single server or groups of SharePoint or file servers.
 
The key business benefits GridBank delivers
to SharePoint environments include:

• Dramatic lowering of SharePoint costs through automated migration to affordable secondary storage, policy-driven management, storage footprint reduction, and maximisation of primary storage capacity, and reduction of storage placed into SQL.
• Greener SharePoint environment with reduced power and cooling costs by shrinking the required storage capacity.
• Enhanced e-discovery, search, and retrieval to maximise end user productivity, cut e-discovery expenses, and simplify recovery of data.
• Easier regulatory compliance: GridBank 1.5 allows IT administrators to leverage advanced search capabilities and deliver data retention, permanence and disposition, as well as the auditing necessary to reduce legal exposure and manage records without limiting SharePoint collaboration.
• Increased security for SharePoint data: GridBank supports integration with Active Directory, data encryption, multiple administrative levels, and the ability to assign additional permissions to users and groups going well beyond the security mechanisms native to SharePoint.
• Improvement in SharePoint performance: by migrating data to GridBank, SharePoint users will much less frequently hit their quota limitation, storage performance is optimised, and SharePoint backup windows are shortened.
• Consistent management across all SharePoint deployments:  GridBank allows the consolidation of multiple SharePoint sites into a single virtual storage pool, the assignment of consistent policies from SharePoint server to SharePoint server, and transparent access to SharePoint.
• Seamless integration with SharePoint environments: SharePoint data archived to GridBank can be easily accessed as if it was still on the original SharePoint server, while GridBank’s SharePoint integration delivers instant in-line archiving, advanced search and e-discovery capabilities, one-click retrieval, no additional training to use GridBank in SharePoint environments.

“Our end users are looking to more effectively manage the exploding data in their file-based and SharePoint deployments”, said, Jeanne Wilson, president, Condor Storage, Inc., a Tarmin authorised channel partner. “GridBank 1.5 delivers our customers the most comprehensive active archiving solution in the market today and is ideal for both large enterprise and smaller companies alike. With GridBank 1.5, our customers will substantially reduce their SharePoint storage demands, have easy-to-use archiving, deploy strong e-discovery capabilities, benefit from automated policy management, and maintain seamless SharePoint integration.”
 
Availability
GridBank 1.5 will be generally available in early Q3 of 2009 from Tarmin and its network of value added channel partners.