Grau Data Joins Active Archive Alliance

GRAU DATA AG has joined the Active Archive Alliance, a non-profit storage industry association dedicated to market education on the evolving use of active archives for simplified, online access to all unstructured file data.

“GRAU DATA AG is excited to become a contributing member of the Active Archive Alliance,” said Andy Richards, VP North American Operations, GRAU DATA AG. “The Alliance’s mission to promote open systems approaches to archiving is consistent with GRAU DATA’s mission. By enabling archives to be built to take advantage of the performance and availability of disk systems with the scalability, cost, data longevity and green aspects of tape, an active archive becomes a key component of every IT organizations infrastructure.”

Active archiving eliminates the typical trade-off between keeping data visible in online disk arrays and moving the data to more cost-effective tape in a backup file. Organizations are now able to use both tape and disk in a large heterogeneous storage pool behind a standard file system interface. This enables online access to archive data, making it searchable and quickly accessible, while ensuring data integrity and simplified data management.

GRAU DATA offers two software solutions to address the needs of applications requiring long term secure active archive storage: ARCHIVEMANAGER and FILELOCK.

About ARCHIVEMANAGER
Data and information form the capital of any company. Making these available when required is the task of the IT department. This makes efficient archiving absolutely essential. The ARCHIVEMANAGER uses open systems hardware, both disk and automated tape, to address these needs and integrates seamlessly into an existing Windows and/or Linux system environment.

Key benefits of ARCHIVEMANAGER are:

Scalability – whether it is a medium-sized company or a large concern, the ARCHIVEMANAGER dynamically scales from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes.
Hardware independent – the ARCHIVEMANAGER allows you to use varying hardware components from all the major server and storage manufacturers.
Cost-effective – ArchiveManager’s dynamically scalable architecture allows customers to grow their archive as needs arise. New server and storage technology can be deployed incrementally as available and no expensive data migration is required as new components are utilized.
Open interface – integrates using standard file systems to eliminate application compatibility issues and also supports network environments via CIFS and/or NFS. No proprietary APIs are required.
Application independent – by providing a standard file system interface, application compatibilities are maintained today and in the future.
Storage pools – fast disk-based systems or magnetic tape? The ARCHIVEMANAGER makes both options freely available, and enables the combination of archive media to create a tailored tiered storage solution, regardless of the combinations of: disk/disk, disk/tape, tape/tape, local and remote.
Data security – with multiple copies, saved locally and/or remotely, you need not worry about your data. And the file system metadata is protected in redundant systems to facilitate rapid disaster recovery should it be required.

About FILELOCK
FILELOCK is a hardware-independent Windows based software product which ensures WORM functionality based on standard hard disk systems, either SAN or NAS attached. FILELOCK allows written files to be read, but not to be altered within a set lifetime. Only when this ‘retention period’ is up, can or must this data be deleted. Unauthorized access is no longer possible with FILELOCK managed volumes.

Organizations are archiving increasing amounts of data as they grapple with data growth, retention, compliance rules and the need to leverage the knowledge and information within their organization. As organizations archive more data, the challenge of accessing that data when needed has intensified. Active archive solutions resolve this issue by turning offline archives into visible, accessible extensions of online storage systems – enabling fast, easy access to all archived data through a file system interface.

The industry trend toward active archiving is being enabled and accelerated by recent advancements in active archive applications as well as archive tape and disk storage technologies. Today’s innovative active archive applications provide the ability to see and access data on tape through a file system interface, making it easy and affordable to view and search archived data files in large heterogeneous online active tape and disk storage pools.