15 Storage Companies at Active Archive Alliance

The Active Archive Alliance has grown by 70, adding seven new members within the last year and bringing the total number of members to 15 storage companies.

This growth in membership underscores the demand for active archives for long-term storage and the maturing of the active archive market.

Shrinking IT budgets, exponential data growth, and longer retention periods are driving the need for more cost-effective long-term storage. Active archives provide online access, searchability and easy retrieval of long-term data, and enable virtually unlimited scalability to accommodate future growth. In addition, active archive software technologies allow existing file systems to expand over flash, disk, tape and optical storage technologies, including integrating with the latest object storage platforms, allowing the data center to become future proof.

“The market has matured to a point where accessibility and performance are essential to long-term storage. What’s more, the skyrocketing cost of managing long-term data is driving the need for improved operational efficiencies,” said Molly Rector, COB, Active Archive Alliance and EVP of product management and WW marketing, Spectra Logic Corp. “The Active Archive Alliance has been instrumental in educating the market on the value of active archives to solve these challenges. Our membership growth reflects the commitment by industry-leading storage companies to bring together new technology solutions via an active archive model.”

Long-term data management can no longer be tied to the generation of hardware that happens to be available today. Storage hardware has a relatively short lifespan, while the data itself often must endure indefinitely. The key to solving this dilemma is an active archive strategy that decouples storage hardware from the data assets. As new technology emerges, administrators can absorb it into the seamless fabric of their storage environment with no negative impact to users or existing applications.

Benefits of an active archive include:

• Greater Capacity: Active archives offer an intelligent storage framework that effortlessly scales to petabytes of data across different storage mediums from different vendor providers.
• Lower Cost: According to a recent QStar cost of acquisition analysis, replacing 100TB of primary storage and deduplicated disk backup appliance with an active archive would save an organization over $700,000 in acquisition costs (90% savings). As capacities increase so do the savings. At 2PB, an active archive would cost $15 million less than primary storage plus deduplicated backup, a 95% cost savings.
• Accessibility: Active archives enable rapid data access with straight-from-the-desktop retrieval of files stored on any storage tier.
• Building Private Cloud: Cloud-based archiving is a convenient way to add storage capacity without the need for more CapEx investments and ensures the long-term preservation of the data.
• Long Term Technology Migration: A true active archive environment provides for a seamless upgrade to future technologies, including all performance tiers and media. Decoupling the data from any hardware dependency is key since it makes the active archive environment future proof.

“While there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution for storage problems, it’s clear that organizations must virtualize data management across different types of technologies and different generations of hardware. And, they must decouple it from the ‘flavor-of-the-moment’ industry trend such that data is indeed managed for the long term. That is the core of an active archive strategy,” said Floyd Christofferson, Active Archive Alliance board member and director of storage product marketing, Silicon Graphics International Corp.

Currently 15 Active Archive Alliance members:
Atempo, Cleversafe, Crossroads Systems, Dell, Fujifilm, Grau Data, HP, Imation, QStar Technologies, Quantum, Scality, Seven10, SGI, Spectra Logic and XenData.