New Vendor Organization: the Active Archive Alliance

Several technology vendors announced the formation of the Active Archive Alliance, whose goal is to bring data archives online to promote simplified access to vast volumes of data.

Organizations increasingly store more data in archives and, as a result, the challenges of indexing, querying and retrieving that data quickly, simply and efficiently has intensified. Active archive solutions resolve these issues by turning offline archives into visible, accessible extensions of online file and storage systems. Having simple, persistent access to archived data allows organizations to mine this information and gain valuable insight based on all the institutional knowledge available.
 
“The Active Archive Alliance supports the growing need organizations have for fast, easy, cost-efficient online access to all of their data. The Alliance is timely and highlights the important issue of archiving data, which is one of the largest and fastest growing storage segments,” said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “The trend towards active archives is driven by such factors as unrelenting data growth, retention compliance, and the need for cost reduction and data center consolidation; its achievement is enabled by the growth in applications that directly connect file systems and automated tape archives.”
 
Developments in active archive applications and in efficient tape and disk technologies now enable organizations to cost-effectively maintain all data in online storage for fast, easy search and retrieval. Today’s active archive applications provide the ability to see and access data on tape or disk through a file system interface. The applications make it easy to view and search directories of existing data files, and they maintain the map that links the name of a file to its storage location. These capabilities enable organizations to better manage their large pools of stored data by allowing them to deploy the most efficient mix of tape and disk storage for their active archive solutions.
 
“Market trends support the adoption of active archives. Recent advancements in tape libraries and archival technologies should help active archiving become a prominent technology in expanding data centers,” said Addison Snell, CEO of InterSect360 Research. “The ability to run file system interfaces over storage pools that include high-throughput, high-density tape libraries will allow more organizations to economically leverage the data in their archives, so they can take full advantage of their institutional knowledge.”
 
The mission of the Active Archive Alliance is to provide organizations with the best practices, tools and information they need to achieve simplified access to the online storage of their archived data. Membership is open to providers of file systems, active archive applications, cloud storage, high density tape and disk storage, as well as individuals and end-users.
 
“Active archiving is becoming a fast-growing trend as organizations seek ways to locate and retrieve critical archived information when needed,” said Molly Rector, vice president of marketing and product management for Spectra Logic. “Active archive solutions increase the efficiency of the data center by providing businesses the benefit of simple, online access to all their institutional knowledge.  And, with new applications that enable users to access tape archives through a file system interface, organizations have more flexibility in designing efficient and affordable active archive solutions using the right mix of tape and disk media.”
 
“QStar is excited to be a founding member of the Active Archive Alliance,” said Dave Thomson, senior vice president of sales, QStar Technologies. “Our company has exclusively offered solutions in the archive world for more than 23 years and completely endorses the messages involved in active archiving, namely combining disk and tape technologies to maximize the benefits of each.  An active archive offers optimized performance and data security for an organization’s most valuable resource: its data.”

“Next generation online archives are changing the implementation model and economics of information lifecycle management and data accessibility.  In addition to our longtime focus on scalability, performance and automation, FileTek delivers rich capabilities for self-healing data assurance and policy-driven governance as foundational tenets of our StorHouse storage virtualization and data management platform,” remarked Gary Szukalski, president of FileTek, Inc. “By leveraging the cost advantages of tape with the direct and random access advantages historically associated only with disk, StorHouse gives organizations easy, economical and managed access to all data – both backup and archive – thereby fulfilling both compliance and day-to-day business requirements from a single, automated system.”
 
“We are joining the Active Archive Alliance because of its dedication to promote contemporary storage solutions that are easy to use, scalable and cost effective,” said Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing, Compellent Technologies. “Today’s mix of file system software, disk and tape deliver solutions that handle large pools of data efficiently and simply within an active archive environment – and address a previously unmet need in the market.”
 
The Active Archive Alliance is a vendor neutral organization. Founding technology partners include Compellent Technologies, FileTek, Inc., QStar Technologies and Spectra Logic Corporation.