* PowerFile claims the first to use Blu-ray for high-volume enterprise storage
PowerFile last week rolled out an archiving appliance that is one of the first to use Blu-ray disk technology to deliver high-volume and energy efficient storage capacity.
The Active Archive Appliance (A3) Enterprise Edition provides as much as 70TB of storage per rack and 120TB per appliance, all at 500TB per kilowatt.
The A3 is designed for storage of digital content – it contains Blu-ray disk technology from Panasonic. The Enterprise Edition appliance is six times larger than its predecessor and features 240 watts of power consumption in a 120TB appliance. Its predecessor used DVD technology. Since the A3 uses Blu-ray technology, it is possible for customers to easily retrieve information from the online archiving appliance.
Blu-ray offers 50GB of storage on a single DVD-sized disk; future releases of Blu-ray will allow 200GB per disk.
The Blu-ray disk also is Write Once, Read Many (WORM) media that protects important information from accidental erasure, unauthorized modification, data corruption and viruses.
To access information, the A3 appliance transfers discs robotically to two drives. A management interface is available called ArcOS. ArcOS resides on a 2U-high server containing four serial ATA drives for a total capacity of 2,000GB, which serves as cache for files that are access frequently. The appliance connects to the network with two Gigabit Ethernet ports and supports the Unix/Linux Network File System, Microsoft’s Common Internet File System and HTTP. Further it supports Windows, Linux and Unix operating environments.
It competes with Plasmon’s UDO Archive Appliance, which uses Ultra Density Optical drives.
The A3 Enterprise Edition Base System provides 10TB of archive capacity and 2TB of dynamic cache at $42,000 with 10TB Expansion Kits available at $28,000.
