News | September 30, 2008

Moonwalk Teams With Plasmon To Extend Capabilities Of Hierarchical Storage Management Systems

Moonwalk Inc. recently announced that it has partnered with Plasmon on a joint solution that provides companies using traditional Hierarchical Storage Management solutions greater control of their datasets and optimal use of their storage infrastructure without the technology's associated management headaches, extra costs and risks.

Extending the capabilities of HSM solutions, Moonwalk 6.0 advanced data migration software can intelligently move, copy or archive files from various platforms and file systems to the Plasmon Archive Appliance based on the business value of the unstructured data under storage. This singular approach enables companies to proactively manage data throughout the enterprise while allowing them to find data, allocate destinations, set rules and policies and run tasks from a single administrator interface that lets them drill down to the details easily and swiftly.

"Plasmon's UDO Archive Appliance complements the Moonwalk environment by providing the natural repository for infrequently accessed files that must be retained." said Patrick Dowling, VP of Global Marketing for Plasmon. "Data migrated to the Archive Appliance is secured on both disk and true WORM UDO media. This strategy ensures data accessibility, record authenticity, and the 100 year UDO media life provides long-term access while greatly extending data lifecycles. For our customers this enables their ability to address regulatory compliance and reduce corporate risk, while lowering capital equipment costs and dramatically reducing power consumption in the data centre. Our joint solution gives enterprises a much greater range of HSM capability and a very compelling value proposition."

Ray Quattromini, Managing Director, Fortuna Power Systems, a UK-based data storage solutions specialist, long time promoter of the "Green Data Centre", and a reseller of Moonwalk and Plasmon products said "With the vast amounts of data now subject to regulatory requirements and long-term retention the Moonwalk-Plasmon combination redefines the economics for building an enterprise Information Lifecycle Management solution. The simplicity and versatility of the Moonwalk software to easily manage migrate and archive data combined with the value proposition and scalability of UDO-based Archive Appliance gives our customers an unbeatable solution address the unrestrained growth of corporate data."

The solution allows users to deploy a set of policies for classifying and archiving data, and it makes certain that these centrally configured policies will be distributed and enforced right to the edge of the network. It's also network-aware and data-centric, so it allows for data management by project, location, user, group, size, name, time and other attributes, making complex datasets easier to express in simple data management policies. By enabling full flexibility in setting rules, IT staffs can build everything from simple to complex policies for data management, allowing them to conveniently reuse policies whenever necessary.

"HSM solutions traditionally have limited rule sets and are triggered by storage demands rather than data demands," said Peter Harvey, CEO of Moonwalk. "Common practice at many companies is simply to buy more storage to accommodate data growth, which creates even bigger headaches down the road. With Moonwalk and Plasmon, companies can resolve many of these storage issues today while maintaining effective discrete level management of the data on an ongoing basis."

About Moonwalk 6.0
Moonwalk's enterprise data management software delivers metadata-level precision for all information on network storage, servers and clients. It proactively migrates, copies and moves data according to user-defined rules and policies based on criteria such as age, size, file type, file name, file creator and many more granular classification rules. Moonwalk operates across and between all major file systems, including Windows, NFS, Linux and Novell environments, and all primary and secondary storage environments. Its stateless architecture requires no additional overhead and is completely transparent to users and applications, with no introduced points of potential failure to ensuring maximum performance and availability.

About Moonwalk
Moonwalk, founded in 2002, has introduced the most all-inclusive data management and protection software on Earth. Moonwalk solutions are available for all major operating systems and support most storage platforms. Early adopters of Moonwalk can be found in banking, healthcare, services, distribution, education, government, research and development, aerospace, telecommunications and broadcasting industries. More information can be found at www.moonwalkinc.com.

SOURCE: Moonwalk Inc.