The core product offering from Permabit Technology Corp, the Permabit Enterprise Archive is a modular, disk-based archive storage platform consisting of collections of 2 TB Storage Nodes that are accessed through specialized Access Nodes. Capacity can be increased in the storage grid by adding Storage Nodes (with the platform automatically and transparently redistributing the existing data across the grid when a new node is added); while performance can be scaled through the addition of Access Nodes. The Access Nodes themselves serve the data via the CIFS, NFS, and WebDAV protocols.

Two flavors of the platform are now offered by the vendor. The Business Series supports data protection through a data mirroring scheme (RAIN-M), can scale from 8 TB to 40 TB configurations, and targets medium-sized businesses; while the new Data Center Series targets the largest deployments, supports data protection/redundancy through the vendor's RAIN-EC technology (more below), and scales in size from 16 to 96 TB per grid. An additional software component offered by the vendor--the Storage Pool Expander--allows multiple (up to 32) Permabit Enterprise Archive grids (Business Series, Data Center Series, or combinations of both) to be grouped and managed through a single console.

A key feature of both systems is their support for the vendor's Scalable Data Reduction (SDR) technology, which seeks to reduce the overall storage capacity requirements of the platform by storing only unique data segments on the grid; with duplicated data instead being stored as references-only to the existing stored data. Additional capacity-savings is realized through the use of data compression before the unique data is stored to disk. The SDR technology is also leveraged within the vendor's replication components (offered as additional, dedicated modules), which can support one-to-one or many-to-one replication scenarios (each volume can be replicated to any other remote site) and can transmit to the central DR site only that data that has not been previously replicated from any of the sites; and in built-in snapshot technology that allows for the automated or manually-triggered creation of snapshots (thousands of snapshots are supported). The snapshots themselves leverage the de-duplication technology in that they reference existing data in a volume; the initial snapshot therefore requires almost no additional disk space (less than 1k), and grow only as active data in the system is deleted or modified.

The hardware nodes themselves are 1U in size, are driven by 2 dual-core Intel Xeon processors, include 4 GB of RAM, and contain a quartet of Hitachi 500 GB SATA II drives (7200 RPM). 24 (Business Series) or 48 (Data Center Series) port Gig Ethernet switches (provided with the systems) provide the fabric connectivity between the storage and access nodes; while the Access Nodes then connect to the customer's LAN using their existing switches.

As aforementioned, the new Data Center Series platform features the vendor's RAIN-EC protective technology, which protects data by distributing copies to multiple nodes such that it can survive multiple simultaneous failures to two different storage nodes. The Business Series' RAIN-M technology is designed to withstand the failure of any single node in the grid.

Management of the system is through the vendor's Web-based Permabit Manager, which supports integrated SNMP and E-mail event notification capabilities. WORM storage is supported through a SnapLock-compatible application interface which the vendor notes supports hundreds of existing applications.

Add-on modules for the platforms include the high availability module, which joins pairs of Access Nodes in active/standby configurations (the standby node maintains an active journal of processed transactions and can assume read/write chores when necessary without loss of data); the aforementioned replication features (handled through dedicated replication nodes); a Retention Policies module that allows for the retention of data based on volume, file type, file ownership, and group access criteria (allows for the application of WORM policies to legacy applications that are not compatible with the application WORM interface described above); and a Discovery module that leverages technology from FAST Search and Transfer.

Permabit Enterprise Archive is available now. Contact the vendor for further information.