PowerFile Moves to Forefront

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- PowerFile Inc., the leader in hybrid storage appliances for long-term storage of digital content and assets, today announced major enhancements to its flagship Active Archive Appliance™ (A3) that significantly improve density, scalability, performance, energy efficiency, and manageability. In addition to doubling performance and increasing rack density 400%, PowerFile has boosted the A3’s industry-leading energy efficiency to over 700TB per kilowatt. With these enhancements, the A3 now supports up to 280TB of online capacity in a standard 42U rack enclosure while using less than 5% of the power and cooling required for an equivalent disk-based storage solution.

Manageability is vastly improved with the addition of capacity optimization software, data retention/disposition policies, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) support. PowerFile’s capacity optimization software uses adaptive inline data reduction with intelligent algorithm selection for up to 7X reduction of data with minimal impact on performance. Data retention and disposition policies greatly increase the flexibility of the A3 by allowing administrators to automatically preserve and then dispose of data based on file age, file activity, or a specific date. Actions such as policy creation, policy modification and file deletion are electronically logged to provide an audit trail for legal and compliance purposes. The addition of SNMP support allows for seamless integration with existing enterprise storage resource management tools to proactively monitor system status and health.

The A3 is built upon a unique hybrid storage architecture that combines up to 34TB of fast, disk-based cache with up to 240TB of Blu-ray based archive storage. The ArcOS software that is embedded in the A3 virtualizes all of the storage subsystems into pools of storage that can be managed as a single large volume or multiple, smaller volumes depending on customer requirements. Cache can be dynamically allocated to deliver the optimal blend of performance and economy. Combined with PowerFile’s Archive Facilitator™ and Touchless DR™ WAN replication, the Active Archive Appliance offers the industry’s most compelling end-to-end archiving solution encompassing data discovery, contextual classification, automated archiving, cost-effective storage, and best-in-class data protection.

“With over 100 enterprise customers storing critical information on Active Archive Appliances, PowerFile is amassing a tremendous amount of feedback on features that customers would like to see in future products,” said Kirk Dunn, CEO of PowerFile. “That feedback, combined with the benefit of designing our systems from the ground up specifically for cost-effective archiving, allows PowerFile to continually enhance our products and deliver significant improvements to the rapidly growing archive storage market.”

PowerFile Inc.