Austrian Start-Up SmApper Partnering With Iron Mountain Digital

SmApper Technologies GmbH is teaming up with Iron Mountain Digital to jointly market and integrate their file archiving solutions.

Smapper complements Iron Mountain Digital’s Virtual File Store service by transparently integrating cloud storage services into the customers’ primary storage architecture to improve the cost, management, security and compliance of unstructured data. Joint customers benefit twice: they achieve file archiving as a cloud service integrated into their tier 1 storage and can save storage costs of more than 40% by using the Smapper solution.

“Smapper delivers intelligent, automated file-solutions for enterprise customers and service providers,” said Gunther Thiel, CEO of Smapper Technologies. “Our partnership with Iron Mountain Digital enables us to provide our joint customers the best combination of internal and external resources for their storage management. The launch of our integrated solution at CeBIT has been very well received by IT professionals from enterprise and medium-sized businesses.”

“Together with Smapper we offer our customers an attractive, demand-driven solution for archiving files. Files are migrated in a manner that is automatic and completely transparent to both the end user and the IT environment into our Virtual File Store solution. This in turn optimizes the customer’s storage cost,” said Hartmut Wagner, SVP Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Iron Mountain Digital.

Unstructured data is typically 60 to 80 percent of the data volume in most enterprises. Unlike databases and applications, unstructured data growth is difficult to predict and manage. As a result, customers over-provision their primary storage capacity in order to meet end user service level requirements. This primary storage is expensive to purchase and manage. With Smapper’s Application Platform, customers can delay increasing their primary storage.

Smapper allows Iron Mountain Digital’s enterprise customers to create customized, granular policies that automatically determine which older and infrequently accessed data will be selected to move from primary storage to secondary storage offered by Iron Mountain Digital. This migration happens real-time, in the background, on an on-going basis. Smapper’s Application Platform accomplishes this for both CIFS and NFS files without the need for any changes to existing applications, processes, procedures and utilities (such as snapshots and other storage functions and scripts). Real-time and on-going capabilities ensure that security and compliance policies are automatically enforced.

The combination of Iron Mountain Digital’s and Smapper’s solutions enables customers to make efficient use of on- and off-premise storage to meet data management requirements. For example, the customer can select the level of granularity, including down to the level of a single file, which data should be stored on-premise, which data should go into the cloud and which data should be stored at both locations for disaster recovery purposes. On premise, secondary storage also can be used as a lower cost storage tier and an intelligent cache which is seamlessly integrated into the Iron Mountain Digital off-premise back end. This architecture enables customers to implement efficient, on-demand capacity management as well as cost effective back-up and disaster recovery.