Active Archive Alliance To Promote Simplified, Affordable Online File Archive Access To European Organisations
Alliance to Offer Best Practices, Compatibility and Education for Active Archive Solution; Adds New Partners
The Active Archive Alliance, whose goal is to bring data archives online to promote simplified access to vast volumes of data, recently announced plans to expand its educational and awareness-building activities into the European market. Organisations increasingly store more data in archives and, as a result, the challenges of indexing, querying and retrieving that data quickly, simply and efficiently has intensified. Active archive solutions resolve these issues by turning offline archives into visible, accessible extensions of online file and storage systems. Having simple, persistent access to archived data allows organisations to mine this information and gain valuable insight based on all the institutional knowledge available.
The mission of the Active Archive Alliance is to provide organisations with the best practices, tools and information they need to achieve simplified access to the online storage of their archived data. Membership is open to providers of file systems, active archive applications, cloud storage, high density tape and disk storage, as well as individuals and end-users. The Active Archive Alliance is a vendor neutral organisation founded by technology partners Compellent Technologies, FileTek, QStar Technologiesand Spectra Logic Corporation. Since its launch in April 2010, the Alliance has also added new partners SGI, Atempo and GRAU Data, which is headquartered in Germany.
"The trend towards active archives is being driven by significant data growth, compliance requirements and data center consolidation, and is being enabled by technological advancements and changes in IT service delivery models through adoption of cloud computing in particular. The Active Archive Alliance will help raise awareness amongst European end-users of the need for standardisation, best practices, and appropriate infrastructure management in order to take advantage of this paradigm change in IT consumption and delivery. Instead of having vast offline archives delivering little value to the business, online archives are now a viable option for any organisation looking to derive value from bringing data online," said Roy Illsley, principal analyst at Ovum.
Developments in active archive applications and in efficient tape and disk technologies now enable organisations to cost-effectively maintain all file data in online storage for fast, easy search and retrieval. Today's active archive applications provide the ability to see and access data on tape or disk through a file system interface. The applications make it easy to view and search directories of existing data files, and they maintain the metadata map that links the name of a file to its storage location. These capabilities enable organizations to better manage their large pools of stored data by allowing them to deploy the most efficient mix of tape and disk storage for their active archive solutions.
SNW-Europe attendees can hear Molly Rector, vice president, marketing and product management at Spectra Logic discussing active archives in a SNIA Presentation - Active Archive: Data Protection for the Modern Data Center, taking place today at 4:05pm CET in Spektrum 2 Auditorium.
For more information www.activearchive.com.
About The Active Archive Alliance
The Active Archive Alliance is a collaborative industry alliance dedicated to promoting active archives for simplified, online access to all archived data. Launched in early 2010 by founding technology partners, Compellent Technologies, FileTek, Inc., QStar Technologies and Spectra Logic Corporation, the Active Archive Alliance is a vendor neutral organization open to leading providers of active archive technologies including file systems, active archive applications, cloud storage, and high density tape and disk storage, as well as individuals and end-users. Active Archive Alliance members provide active archive solutions, best practices, and industry testimonials so that organizations can achieve fast, online access to all their data in the most cost effective manner. For more information, visit www.activearchive.com.
SOURCE: The Active Archive Alliance