Group Logic Enhances ArchiveConnect

Group Logic (GLI), provider of digital content-driven solutions for collaboration in the enterprise and the cloud, announced the availability of a new release of ArchiveConnect, its File System Archiving (FSA) solution for Mac desktops.

In this latest release, ArchiveConnect 1.1 extends its integration with Symantec’s Enterprise Vault and CommVault’s Simpana to include new usability enhancements and support for network-based home directory environments with active enterprise FSA deployments. Together, these new features measurably boost productivity for Mac users of Symantec and CommVault FSA systems.

"Many of our customers, especially those in content-rich multi-media industries such as entertainment, advertising and healthcare, report one hundred percent storage growth, year over year," said Brian Ulmer, Product Manager for ArchiveConnect at Group Logic. "To curb online storage demands and keep hardware costs in-check, companies often turn to FSA solutions… only to find that many of these solutions don’t effectively support mixed Windows and Mac user populations."

"That’s where ArchiveConnect comes in," Ulmer said. "It removes the incompatibilities between Mac users and the FSA systems they need to access. Since its release over a year ago, ArchiveConnect has helped numerous IT enterprises extend the reach of their FSA systems to include their mixed Windows and Mac user environments – yielding savings of up to 80% in storage hardware costs."

The Mac’s inability to differentiate between online and offline files the same way Windows can present serious challenges. In an archiving environment like Enterprise Vault or Simpana, the Mac’s file previewing features trigger unintended requests to restore archived files automatically. For just about any archiving system, this can cause severe performance impacts. In fact, many IT organizations are forced to segregate Mac users entirely from using Windows-based archiving solutions to prevent system performance degradation.

ArchiveConnect works intuitively with Enterprise Vault and Simpana FSA systems to block Mac systems from previewing archived files while allowing them to preview needed online files. Mac users browse iconic representations of archived files and can select one or more files to be brought back online through a simple double-mouse-click.

In its latest release, ArchiveConnect 1.1 adds support for network-based home directory files. It prevents the Mac Spotlight indexing process from bringing these files online in the same way it prevents other inadvertent FSA file retrievals. In addition, the ArchiveConnect GUI has been further enhanced so Mac users can instantly detect when a file has successfully been brought online.

"We are an educational publisher that consists of Windows and Mac users," said Richard Van der Stap, Projectleader, ICT Infrastructure, of Malmberg. "We recently set out to deploy Symantec’s Enterprise Vault archiving solution within our enterprise, only to be stopped dead in our tracks by Mac OS/X issues which caused corrupted files. Suffice it to say, if not for ArchiveConnect we’d still be wanting for an enterprise file system archiving solution."