Tarmin GridBank Delivers Secure Data Archiving Into the Cloud

Tarmin Technologies announced that GridBank 1.5 seamlessly integrates with cloud storage environments. GridBank allows customers to effortlessly migrate and archive file and SharePoint data from their on-site environments to cloud storage targets, while delivering unprecedented security for file and SharePoint data.

Organisations that use GridBank to connect to cloud storage environments enjoy the comprehensive feature sets and business benefits of GridBank, while taking advantage of the cost reduction and deployment flexibility offered by the cloud storage delivery model. Cloud environments can further enhance the benefits of GridBank, which was developed to significantly reduce storage and data management costs, automate storage administration, and help meet archiving, compliance, and regulatory needs.
 
IDC, one of the world’s leading IT industry analyst firms, forecasts the Cloud storage market will rapidly accelerate its growth, reaching $5.5 billion by 2012 up from $810 million in 2008.
 
“The benefits that cloud storage offers in substantial cost savings and flexible configuration dovetail perfectly with GridBank,” said Shahbaz Ali, founder and CEO of Tarmin. “GridBank’s cloud storage connectivity provides customers with unprecedented security for file and SharePoint data, while delivering transparent access to customer information; powerful e-discovery, search, and data retrieval; and massive scalability. GridBank 1.5’s cloud storage support dramatically enhances data and storage management, diminishes compliance and regulatory risks, and reduces storage costs.”
 
GridBank with Cloud Support Overview
One of the unique technologies at the core of GridBank is its comprehensive object-based secondary storage platform. This allows GridBank to control and manage the backend of on-site storage targets through the creation of virtual heterogeneous storage pools where file and SharePoint-based data objects are archived.  GridBank’s virtual storage pools are vendor and hardware agnostic, scalable to petabytes (PB) of data, self-healing, and highly fault tolerant.
 
In addition, GridBank 1.5 supports cloud storage services as targets for GridBank archives, repositories, and libraries. Customers can easily and quickly connect the GridBank platform to cloud storage services.  On initial release, GridBank will provide connectivity to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which has grown to store over 52 billion objects. Support for additional cloud storage service providers will be forthcoming in later releases.
 
GridBank’s easy-to-use Cloud Storage Wizard allows customers to create connections to various cloud storage targets; it can attach different cloud storage to different GridBank clusters, a single GridBank cluster to multiple cloud storage providers, and provides for both on-premise virtual storage pools and Cloud storage connectivity to the same GridBank configuration. In short, cloud storage is configured, managed, and accessed as easily as data on GridBank’s virtual storage pools.
 
In a recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) research study, 52% of polled organisations were either using or interested in cloud-based storage services for archive data (ESG Research Report, Global Green Business and IT Initiatives, 2008). “This early use and expanding interest is a result of the rapid growth in archive environments for compliance, e-discovery, and business intelligence processes,” said Brian Babineau, senior analyst with ESG. “When managing their archived data, customers want flexible storage options, including capacity available via the cloud. GridBank 1.5’s feature-rich platform enables these customers to shift some of the archive storage management burden to a trusted cloud storage service provider and makes it is easy for these organisations to take advantage of the cost savings that result from archiving and migrating data from expensive primary storage to cost-effective cloud-based storage.”
 
GridBank 1.5 Enhances Cloud Storage Security
Public cloud storage services, such as Amazon’s S3, are ideal for all types of unstructured requirements, including archiving and migration of file and SharePoint-based data. However, enterprise customers frequently consider public cloud storage security to be inadequate, making it one of the biggest hurdles for enterprise-level deployments. GridBank solves this problem by providing a highly secure solution for Cloud storage installations.
 
A core strength of GridBank’s architecture is its array of security features, which are all fully applicable for cloud storage deployments. GridBank encrypts data before it is sent to the cloud storage provider – up to 448-bit blowfish encryption. GridBank also applies a number of other security processes such as role-based access through Active Directory (AD) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integration, multiple GridBank administrator security levels, additional role-based security over and above what an enterprise deploys with AD or LDAP, and the application of unique digital signatures for every object. Moreover, GridBank’s audit management allows IT to track each file or SharePoint object in the cloud storage configuration: who archived it, who accessed it, who shared it, who published it, and who retrieved it. Lastly, GridBank allows the creation of virtual clusters as part of the GridBank Server Grid that can be assigned by administrators to be accessible by specific departments (for example, the finance cluster would only be accessible to finance personnel). In such a configuration, cloud storage resources are only accessible by users with appropriate access to that cluster.
 
GridBank Cloud Storage Benefits
The key business benefits GridBank support for cloud storage delivers include:

• Excellent ROI – With cloud storage costs decreasing daily the return on GridBank is almost instant. After migration, free space is immediately available on primary on-site storage, the data is highly secure in the low cost cloud storage, and users can transparently access information data almost as fast as if the storage was on-premise.
• Storage optimisation and management efficiency – The primary storage footprint is reduced though single instancing and data compression, optimising primary storage performance and capacity.
• Green storage solution – Gives customers a more environmentally friendly storage infrastructure, as there is no need to power and cool storage on-site (reducing the carbon footprint), and a reduction of the amount of physical material that needs to be recycled when physical storage hardware becomes obsolete.
• Military-strength security – Leveraging GridBank’s numerous security options data in cloud storage remains secure.
• Transparent and simple user experience – Users access data via one of GridBank’s seven methods, all completely transparent to the user – regardless of where the data actually resides.
• Policy management – GridBank’s policy management framework allows organisations to migrate the data from primary hosts and storage to cost effective cloud storage with complete security. All policies created through GridBank can be applied to the data migrated to the cloud storage as if it was part of a GridBank on-premise virtual storage pool.
• Flexible deployment – Customers can deploy to cloud storage, on-premise, or a combination of both, depending upon customer cost, security, and management plans.
• E-discovery, search, and indexing – Finding data in cloud storage has traditionally been extremely slow but with GridBank’s E-discovery and indexing technology, it is a matter of seconds. The GridBank index lives in the enterprise on GridBank’s server grid, providing users with the ability to find the data quickly and perform E-discovery requests very efficiently.

 
Availability
GridBank 1.5 with cloud storage support will be generally available in early Q3 of 2009 from Tarmin and its network of value-added channel partners.