IT Press Tour 67: PoINT Software & Systems

We had the opportunity to meet PoINT Software & Systems for the second time during the recent 67th edition of The IT Press Tour held last week in Sofia, Bulgaria. The first meeting was in September 2022 in Paris, France.PoINT Software & Systems GmbH is a privately held, independent software vendor (ISV) founded in 1994 in Germany, with roots in storage and archiving dating back to 1985 through work with Philips and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The company develops software certified as “Software Made in Europe” and has received recognition including the Storage Newsletter Cloud Storage Award 2026 and the EU Commission’s “Go Green & Be Resilient” award for Best Digital Solution. Its core mission centers on helping organizations manage data growth efficiently, reduce costs, and build cyber-resilient storage infrastructures. The session was presented by Thomas Thalmann, co-founder and CEO of the company.

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PoINT frames its solutions around five categories of storage challenges facing organizations today. Technically, these include explosive growth in unstructured data, migration complexity, scalability demands, and data integrity. Economically, rising storage and energy prices alongside unpredictable cloud costs create pressure. Politically, data sovereignty concerns and trade disruptions are increasingly relevant. Legally, compliance, data privacy, archiving obligations, and cybercrime risk require proactive data management. Ecologically, CO2 footprints, energy consumption, and e-waste are growing concerns.
PoINT’s response to these challenges centers on intelligent data tiering, placing the right data in the right place at the right time, using cost-efficient media such as tape, which consumes no energy when inactive and provides natural “air-gapping” against ransomware attacks.

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PoINT offers three main software products:

1. The PoINT Storage Manager, launched in 2007, handles file tiering and archiving. It moves inactive files from primary NAS systems to secondary storage (tape libraries, optical, object stores, or public cloud) using policy-based rules, while maintaining transparent access for end users and applications. It supports all major storage technologies and vendors, with over 200 installations worldwide. A notable case study involves Daimler, which deployed a multi-location architecture with PoINT managing archiving to a private cloud over WAN, using features including WORM, versioning, encryption, and multi-tenancy
2. The PoINT Archival Gateway delivers S3-to-Tape functionality, essentially tape-based S3 object storage. It exposes an Amazon S3-compatible REST API while writing data directly to tape without intermediate disk layers, dramatically reducing storage costs compared to all-disk or public cloud approaches. The system is available in a Compact Edition (single-node, up to 2 libraries, up to 8 drives) and an Enterprise Edition (up to 32 Interface Nodes, 12 tape libraries, 384 drives, and 153.6 GB/s native throughput). It supports geo-distribution across two sites with automatic failover, synchronization, and erasure coding. Tape support spans LTO-5 through LTO-10 and IBM 3592 formats. The ORION S3, developed in partnership with BDT and reseller COMBACK, packages the Archival Gateway with a tape library into a complete turnkey system offering up to 392 PB of native capacity
3. The PoINT Data Replicator handles backup and replication of object and file data to S3-compatible storage systems. It supports two replication modes: S3-to-S3 (between any S3-capable sources and targets, preserving metadata, tags, and object lock) and File-to-S3 (migrating CIFS/NFS file systems into object storage while retaining the original folder structure). Key use cases include cloud repatriation (moving data from public cloud back to on-premises storage), legacy NAS migration, continuous backup using Kafka/SQS change tracking, and S3 bucket synchronization. It integrates tightly with the PoINT Archival Gateway, optimizing tape read sequences to minimize seek time

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Notable customers include Sixt, Daimler, Reisebank, Bayern Invest, PostFinance, Amgen, EMBL-EBI, and the Max-Planck-Institut. EMBL-EBI, facing data volumes in the high hundreds of petabytes, deployed the gateway to archive Kubernetes cluster workloads via S3, achieving read/write throughput exceeding 1PB per week. A European Ministry implemented the system for archiving with erasure coding for cybercrime protection. Technology partners include HPE, NetApp, Fujitsu, Dell EMC, Cloudian, Spectra, and BDT, with resellers including SVA, COMBACK, Cristie, and Computacenter.

The full presentation is available here.