PoINT Storage Manager Stores Shared Data Volume Centrally

Companies with multiple locations and heterogeneous IT environment can face even two challenges by PoINT Storage Manager from PoINT Software & Systems GmbH.

The fast and uncontrolled data growth on local file servers of external locations and the proliferation of local archives fulfilling apparently only compliance requirements.

For these challenges the company offers PoINT Storage manager, a solution combining storage tiering and archiving. A homogeneous and transparent archiving over all locations, simple administration and relieved external file servers are few advantages for the user.

Often companies with several locations and partially centralized IT face the problem, that due to performance reasons, external locations store unstructured data on local file servers, instead of storing data centrally. Based on the data growth individual locations have capacity bottlenecks. Thus responsible IT managers have to take site-specific measures, which conflict with a unified IT structure and additionally require very administrative efforts.

In addition the obligation to fulfill compliance requirements for archiving at external locations is often carried out with locally established methods and approaches. This leads to an uncontrolled growth of archive solutions which can hardly be managed centrally. The thus resulting insufficient archiving and retention policy breaches can have serious consequences for the responsible managers.

With structure, system and intelligent software against the big data chaos, companies can remedy this situation by migrating their inactive data from an external to a centralized storage location and by simultaneously maintaining the data access. Thus a reliable automated archiving of relevant data from external locations can be implemented.

PoINT Storage manager focuses on a three-tiered storage architecture. Existing storage capacities can be used without interrupting ongoing operations. This can be implemented by the so-called agents of PoINT Storage Manager, which control the file server of external locations. Thus the software offers a rule-based data management with automated and transparent data migration and archiving as well as migration between the different tiers. The expensive primary storage (external file servers) of the performance tier is offloaded by migrating inactive data – and these are normally up to 80% of the total data volume – of data stored on the more economic secondary storage within the capacity or archive tier (centralized storage).

Therefore external file servers get rid of inactive data, that directly have effects on the backup processes: They become accelerated by the small data volume. Additionally PoINT Storage Manager generates a standardization of the different storage systems on different locations, thus any further capacity-related extensions are irrelevant. By this software solution users are independent of the storage system manufacturer and are able to change by migration at any time. Thus an unified, transparent archiving for all external locations can be realized and the administration can be simplified.

PoINT products are distributed by 50 partners in more than 25 countries world-wide and have been installed in more than 2 million installations.