BakBone to launch archive option
Tapping into growth in unstructured data
By Maxwell Cooter | Techworld | Published: 15:50, 27 October 2009
Storage software company BakBone has entered the archive market with the launch of the imaginatively entitled NetVault Archive
The product, which complements the company's existing NetVault range offers users a single, tiered storage package, including technologies such as policy-based storage automation, search & e-discovery, policy-based storage automation and audit management.
According to IDC analyst Carla Arendt, the archiving market in Europe rose by 10.5 percent last year and is set to grow at 6 percent this year, despite the economic slowdown, she said that one of the biggest problems facing storage managers was the growth of unstructured data and the need to archive it.
BakBone said that it was looking to meet this challenge with NetVault Archive. Andrew Brewerton, BakBone's EMEA technical director. "Companies face this big problem of unstructured data, which is usually stored on Tier 1 storage, which is high-speed, highly available and highly expensive." He said that customers wanted a cheaper storage repository for this data.
Brewerton claimed that NetVault Archive fitted the bill and would offer a far cheaper option than using Tier 1 storage. "Because we're software, you can build this solution using commodity hardware but there are other operational efficiencies too, you going to need fewer disk arrays, for example, and there are background savinsg too - there's less of a staff overhead."
NetVault: Archive will offer users a selection of features. These include automated policy management; a search and discovery feature to allows users to search across some or all the file data; secondary storage virtualisation; single-instance storage: to eliminate he duplicate copies of files, ?encryption of data and data shredding.
Brewerton also pointed out that as the product was run over a grid, there was no single point of failure. He said that the product was available in two versions, supporting Windows 2003 and Windows 2008, with an Exchange version out next year..
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NetVault Archive, which will be available before the end of the calendar year, is being sold on a graduated pricing scheme starting from £8,500 per terabyte of archived data but falling to £4,000 per terabyte for larger customers.
