PoINT Software and Systems Introduces Archival Gateway – Unified Object Storage

The new storage solution PoINT Archival Gateway – Unified Object Storage is a software-defined S3 object storage which combines the storage classes disk and tape and represents them under a single namespace. Thus, PoINT Software & Systems offers an economic and sustainable solution especially for secondary and archive storage which combines the advantages of disk and tape in one object storage.

With Archival Gateway – Unified Object Storage PoINT Software & Systems introduces the extension of the established, tape-based object storage Archival Gateway. In addition to object storage on tape, Archival Gateway – Unified Object Storage allows the combination of two storage classes – disk and tape – in one unified object storage. Flexible configurations are possible, i.e. tape-only as well as disk-only, with the option of later extension by the respective other storage class.

Objects are moved between storage classes using AWS S3 compatible lifecycle policies. This allows storage technologies to be used most effectively according to their specific characteristics. On the one hand, this contributes to a more cost- and energy-efficient use of the storage infrastructure. On the other hand, expiration policies can also be used to define retention periods and implement the scheduled deletion of objects.

Objects that have been moved to tape can be read again directly from tape. A restore to disk is also optionally possible. In addition, Archival Gateway – Unified Object Storage can perform automatic replication to disk and tape.

Compared to the original tape-based object storage, the addition of a hard disk storage class offers users a variety of additional use cases. Especially applications which expect low latencies, e.g. HPC file systems, certain backup applications and data management solutions, like iRODS, can use Archival Gateway – Unified Object Storage as target storage system.

Comments

This announcement from PoINT Software & Systems made in Paris, France during the recent 45th edition of The IT Press Tour, confirms a real trend on the market as we have identified 8 players globally providing this kind of solution.

But first let's give some background information about the company as the player is quite confidential even with a real expertise in the domain. The company was founded in 1994 in Germany, almost 30 years ago, with some roots at Philips and DEC, and is still private. The team was recognized for its expertise in media management and virtual file system in front of optical jukebox, this was the time of PoINT Jukebox Manager. More than 2,500 licenses of the product have been sold.

At remember that, in addition to PoINT, players like Epoch Systems acquired by EMC (then Dell), UniTree then OTG and Legato then EMC, OpenVision HSM then Veritas HSM become Storage Migrator, HPSS, AMASS then EMASS, LSC, CRAY DMF and more recently StrongLink (formerly Strongbox Data Solutions), Seven10 then Congruity360, Spectra Logic, Grau Data, Quantum, Nodeum, Komprise and Versity. Several of them have been acquired, some others are still alive with their associated technologies and of course we saw more recently some new players, ideas and solutions as the cloud introduced a new way to store data.

These vendors illustrated the brilliant days of HSM. We also have in mind some troubles with HSM that have contributed to the change of the name, we prefer today the term migration and even better tiering which is more global and encompass various implementations. But the need is still here especially with a massive growth of data volumes and various storage media available, all with different characteristics and price.

Back to PoINT, since the beginning, the firm targets unstructured data and has developed several products. Today 3 products are really actively promoted: Storage Manager, Archival Gateway and Data Replicator.

Storage Manager, launched in 2007, is a file tiering and archiving product, deployed more than 200 times worldwide. It supports of course multiple storage media such flash, HDD, SSD and optical and systems like NAS/file servers, object storage, tape and optical libraries and public cloud storage of course. It can be seen as a classic HSM with some extensions around an archive file system and UDF archive volumes.

The second product is Archival Gateway which is an object layer in front of tape libraries (TL). A bit like a modern VTL, if we can say that, the idea is to couple the ubiquitous universal S3 API and interface with any TL. This idea comes from what hyperscalers do with TLs and their object storage interface. The PoINT product implements erasure coding to protect data and offers a remote connection capability to tape thanks to the http-based protocol.

The product could be complemented by Data Replicator to copy files to S3 or S3 to S3.

The new product iteration marks a clear development that bridges the disk and tape exposing a single namespace outside via the S3 API. Users can setup some S3 lifecycle policies to move/copy/tier data across the disk and tape level. Mirroring is also possible. Data can served from any level without the need to copy on disk, that copy is optional. A very clever idea supported by 3 decades of expertise.

As said in the beginning, even with some subtitle differences, we identify 8 players offering S3 to tape: Fujifilm, Nodeum, PoINT, QStar, Quantum, Spectra Logic, StrongLink and XenData.