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New life has been breathed into Plasmon, after the company confirmed that it has successfully completed a private equity buyout that should secure the archiving side of the business.

Earlier in the month, Plasmon Plc announced that its UK operations (Plasmon Ltd) had been placed in administration. That hasn't changed, however selected assets of that company have now being acquired by a US-based company, Plasmon Holding LLC.

"Plasmon Holding LLC is the acquisition holding company (of a private equity group), and the branding has yet to be determined," said CEO Steven Murphy. "That said, we have acquired Plasmon Inc, Plasmon China, Plasmon Belgium, and Plasmon Italy, and the specific assets necessary to support an organisation focused on the archiving market. France, Italy, Ireland, UK, we didn't buy those."

Indeed, Murphy told Techworld that in addition to not acquiring the Plc business, the new Plasmon also did not acquire "the consulting business, the French mastering (CD/DVD) business, and the RAID stuff in Ireland."

Plasmon's future is now therefore very much as a US-based company. "We have centralised our customer configuration, customer care, R&D, and finance operations in Plasmon's Colorado Springs offices. We also have executive offices in Northern Virginia that operates our global sales and marketing," said Murphy.

Murphy was also keen to talk about the new company's simplified product set going forward.

"We are focused on the archiving market place and the problems customers seeing," he said. "We can provide them (the customers) with 90 years of storage on an optical disk, combined with RAID, in our archiving solution."

Murphy also confirmed that the new company was keeping Plasmon's UDO media. "This is the technology that has been implemented on RAID, and the mixing of those two media types allows for us to offer this storage offering."

"What we really support is customers need for compliance and data protection," said Murphy. "We do not compete with their primarily and secondary storage providers. We are interoperable, and support a disk based approach."

He cited the company's partnerships with Netapp, IBM, and others going forward, and said the company is focusing on its ‘3,2,1 approach', which allows for "at least three single instance data copies, on two types of media, one of which is removable, long-lived, and powered down."

"The sad fact is 80 percent of data in data centres is highly redundant, and hasn't been assessed in years," said Murphy. "Indeed it is rarely accessed after six weeks. So we dedupe it, store it once, so you can get to it if you need it, but it doesn't cost you an arm and a leg."

"We are a copy of last resort, not backup and recovery service, we don't compete with that." Murphy highlighted the green aspects of the technology as well, by helping data centres consolidate their power savings. "We can store data at 10 percent of the power consumption of traditional primary raid storage," he said.

"This is a company that has a very focused mission now, with a simplified business model, to deliver this archive solution cheaper and faster, with less distractions," he said.

That said, this new mission statement will be of little comfort to the UK workforce that have been made redundant, or to those working for Plasmon Plc which is still in administration, although Murphy tried to reassure UK customers.

"We have sales and marketing operations contracted in the UK," said Murphy. "Effectively we have a two tier distribution channel in every country in Europe. But in the UK, we will rely heavily on our network of distributors and resellers, and very heavily on our UK partners."