Hitachi Data Systems has entered the fixed content archiving market by striking up a partnership with Archivas.
The two announced plans to deliver solutions that will “define a new ‘active archive’ market space,” pledging to “address customer needs for the long-term preservation, simplified management and rapid retrieval of structured and unstructured data.”
HDS and Archivas said they won’t be “burdening customers by introducing yet another island of storage for content archives and yet another set of software tools and management interfaces.” Instead, they said they will develop “a massively scalable active archive solution within a common management framework that enables customers to take advantage of the unique and established storage virtualization technologies already available from Hitachi.”
The result of the companies’ collaboration will compete against established products such as EMC’s Centera.
“Vendors who delivered the first generation products in the content archive market have clearly not considered the serious management and cost implications that result from multiple isolated islands of storage dedicated to different applications or thought strategically about how to scale to handle the massive amount of data customers are accumulating,” stated Jack Domme, senior vice president for global solutions strategy and development at HDS.
HDS and Archivas, he said, “have carefully thought about the direction our customers and their critical applications, availability and performance requirements are going, and designed an active archive offering that addresses those next-generation requirements.”
The information lifecycle management (ILM) notion that the value of data declines over time “falls apart” in the face of events such as legal discovery or audit requests, said John McArthur of IDC. “These aren’t static archives, they’re active,” McArther said. “Solutions that address not only the archive requirement, but also the management and active retrieval requirements, provide an approach that is better suited to address real-world archiving requirements.”
More than half of all corporate data is “fixed content,” such as documents, images, e-mail and other data, according to the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). What’s more, ESG counts more than 15,000 laws and regulations in the U.S. that address the creation, storage, access, maintenance and retention of information.
“ESG has found that the active archive arena is one of the fastest-growing markets in disk storage,” said ESG senior analyst Tony Asaro. “The main drivers for this are meeting regulatory compliance mandates, litigation protection and to improve IT efficiencies.”
HDS said it will be unveiling its active archive solution in the second quarter.
The HDS deal wasn’t the only win this week for Archivas, which also announced a $12 million third round of funding, bringing the company’s total financing to more than $28 million. The round was led by existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners and Solstice Capital.
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