Profile of UK Company Disk Archive

Disk Archive Corporation Ltd., in Reading, UK, is a discret and relatively old private company, incorporated in April 2011 and apparently without any VCs behind it.

Its products, also sold in US since 2016, is a combination of hardware using HDD subsystems and software, are aimed as replacing tape libraries for broadcast and media applications. Company also has customers in Africa and Asia.

Main executives

Alan Hoggarth, MD since the inception of the company, was formerly at KIT digital (now Piksel) and Pharos Communications after six years at Omneon Video Networks, following two years at Sony Broadcast and Professional Europe and seven ones at Abeka Video Systems.

Tomas Petru, marketing director since one year, is originated from Czech Republic with backgroung in companies like Zoo Praha, Visual Unity (president and CEO), Unity Mobile (CEO) and Visual Unity Global (CEO). He was also at KIT digital Czech for six years.

Marina Eiserle, business development director since 3 years, came from Russia, and got previously positions at Emotion Systems and The Foundry.

The firm provides a technology for archiving and cold storage – ALTO (Alternative to LTO), a high-density, enterprise, offline data archive platform, an alternative to robotic tape libraries and clustered RAID storage setups.

“Based on fully spun-down disks, ALTO has ultra-low power consumption and triple digit extended disk life,” according to the company.

Using a variant of MAID or  massive array of idle disks (remember Copan or Nexsan) spin-down technology with independent disk control, ALTO offers superior performance to tape, is more secure than RAID with options for removable media and shelf-storage. Company’s disk management software Proetheus allows idle disks to be stopped, saving power and providing longer life.

It integrates media management applications and is supported by 30 industry media and archive management technology partnershttps://www.diskarchive.com/partners/ with APIs or ALTO FIler, a virtual file system for archive to be mounted as a CIFS or NFS volume.

Tape-less ALTO provides scalable capacity and security thanks to user-defined replication level. Based on spun-down disks, it has low power consumption and “triple digit extended disk life.” It combines on-line and off-line storage using individually managed, commodity disks that can be externalized for vault storage and bank-like security.

ALTO has the ability to add disks of any capacity from any vendor. It scales up to 1EB.

The data stored may be additionally secured by encryption, with options for secure bulk end-of-life erasure.

Unlike data tape, an ALTO archive-based on helium filled disks is immune to atmospheric humidity and pollutants, allowing operation in hostile locations and no-go situations.

There are three products:

• ALTO Essential, entry level device, with a capacity range from 8TB to 240TB in small increments, disk by disk.
• ALTO Freedom with storage density of 7.2PB of uncompressed data in a single rack
• ALTO Infinity includes full externalization of individual disk drives for shelf or vault storage, and infinite storage capacity.

What is missing is de-dupe.

There are currently many competitors in cold storage including Dell EMC, IBM, Oracle (also a partner), Quantum, Spectra Logic, as well as optical jukebox and big cloud cold storage vendors.