Amplidata Unveils 'Unbreakable' Unstructured Data Storage

Amplidata has seen the future, and it's unstructured data, especially in the cloud. According to a new report from IDC (Leveraging Metadata Framework Technology to Take Control of the Information Explosion), unstructured data and metadata are the fastest-growing categories, increasing at an average annual growth rate of 62 percent, with up to 90 percent of the digital universe unstructured data and metadata. Corporations will be responsible for 85 percent of that data, so a solution like AmpliStor AS20, a 20Tb storage appliance, looks tailor-made for this opportunity. The company says it makes really reliable, really efficient and really low-cost 'unbreakable' storage.

In a recent blog, analyst George Crump, Storage Switzerland, wrote that there is a definite need for Amplidata's scale-out storage solution in the provider market. The company's technology improves a provider's ability to meet the increasing demands on capacity, reliability, as well as meet their internal demands of simplified management and power efficiency, he states.

With the AmpliStor Optimized Object Storage (OOS) system, the company says it can address the demand for petabyte-to-exabyte-scale unstructured data storage for applications such as active archives, online media applications and storage clouds. It enables a highly-scalable, self-healing solution with virtually no limit on object sizes or on the number of objects that can be managed and stored.

Using its BitSpread technology, Amplidata says that it can increase reliability by factors of 100,000 times or more and nearly eliminate the chance of data loss. Additionally, AmpliStor requires 50-70 percent less underlying storage capacity, achieving cost savings of up to 90 percent over competing solutions. The company sees three main pockets of initial demand: active archives for media; online applications that deal with rich media; and hosting providers moving to the cloud.

Available in a 1U rack-mount module, the AS20 storage nodes consume less than 7 Watts per terabyte, one/tenth the requirement for traditional disk systems. Capable of supporting billions of objects and scaling to hundreds of petabytes, AmpliStor is 'nearly impervious' to data loss, with reliability levels 100,000-times higher than RAID.Today's current generation of storage systems are running out of gas and at sometime they're going to hit the wall, says analyst Marc Staimer, president and CDS of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "Amplidata has a very effective product for that growth of unstructured data and they can do it cost effectively and reliably."

By combining object orientation and erasure code, Amplidata gives you virtually unlimited scalability and without losing performance. "Erasure code is far more reliable than RAID. It doesn't require the overhead, that's where the unbreakable comes from."

Most of the major vendors like EMC, NetApp, HP and HDS have object-oriented storage solutions but they don't have great products in this space, says Staimer. "In all cases, none of these scale out into the billions of objects, and when you talk about cloud, you're talking about billions of objects. Amplidata with AmpliStor does scale!"

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