While the adoption of disk storage systems for backups has successfully occurred, long-term electronic data archives are still largely maintained on magnetic tape. Tape’s advantages as a medium for long-term archiving are quite clear as well: very low media cost, low power cost (zero for offline tapes), extended archive life and removability. For these reasons, tape still is the incumbent technology for long-term data archiving of large-scale data, including the critical digital assets managed in media and entertainment. Many storage architectures will store 3 copies of all data on 2 media, of which one will be kept remotely. Typically, that is one copy on Tier 1 NAS or SAN and two copies on tape. Amplidata enables companies to build Live Archives with only one tier of highly efficient and reliable disk storage.
AmpliStor provides the following key advantages over tape:
* Online performance: AmpliStor provides instantaneous access to large unstructured data objects. The system can scale-out performance to tens of Gigabytes per second.
* Auto-management: the system can be easily scaled to petabytes by adding more storage nodes, with the system self-managing capacity, monitoring system health and self-healing failures within the system, such as disk drives or storage nodes.
* Data migration: the system provides auto-migration capabilities to new storage nodes, with new higher disk densities. This enables very long-term archives and eliminates the problems of tape media obsolescence as well as complex data migration problems.
All of these advantages are combined into a system that provides up to 90% power savings versus other disk based storage systems, and provides a new low cost point, and total cost of ownership. In many cases, the TCO of AmpliStor is much closer to tape than to other disk based storage solutions. AmpliStor provides very low costs both from a capital and operational perspective.
