Appliance Leverages Next-Generation Blu-ray Disc Technology to Deliver 70 Terabytes per Rack, 120 Terabytes per Appliance, and Industry-Leading Energy Efficiency of 500 Terabytes per Kilowatt
PowerFile®, an innovator in archive appliances for permanent storage of digital content and assets, today announced the introduction of the Active Archive Appliance™ (A3™) Enterprise Edition, the industry’s most energy efficient system for online data storage. PowerFile’s third generation appliance incorporates industry-standard Blu-ray Disc™ technology from Panasonic to increase density by a factor of six to an enterprise-class 70TB in a 42U rack enclosure. By introducing an entirely new approach to keeping fixed content data – such as documents, images and media files – accessible on the network and ‘active,’ PowerFile is uniquely able to offer a fully configured 120TB appliance that consumes less than 240W of power1.
Prior to the recent introduction of Blu-ray, standard optical storage technologies had not kept pace with the densities of disk- and tape-based alternatives making it impossible for optical-based systems to meet the storage requirements of large enterprises with hundreds of terabytes of data. Blu-ray changes all that by offering 50GB of storage on a single DVD-sized disc with a technology roadmap that promises 200GB per disc. This order of magnitude increase in density is what enables PowerFile to offer up to 70TB of storage in a standard 42U rack enclosure and up to 120TB per appliance, making the A3 Enterprise Edition the most compelling storage solution to leverage optical media in more than a decade.
With 97% of data centers expected to be out of power by 2011 and storage consuming almost 40% of data center power2, keeping information online and accessible is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge for large organizations. PowerFile’s unique approach of dynamically caching most frequently accessed data and preserving archives in a virtualized, massive array of Blu-ray media, allows the A3 Enterprise Edition to provide the online accessibility of disk-based alternatives while consuming less than 5% of the power. In fact, the A3 Enterprise Edition is so energy efficient that it consumes less than 20% of the power required for leading Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) solutions3 that have been specifically designed to reduce energy consumption.
In addition to extensive qualifications of “archive-grade” Write Once, Read Many (WORM) media that protects important information from accidental erasure, unauthorized modification, data corruption and viruses, PowerFile has developed patented and patent-pending technologies that give the A3 Enterprise Edition industry-leading data integrity that is 1,000 times more reliable than enterprise tape or disk-based RAID4.
The A3 Enterprise Edition Base System provides 10TB of archive capacity and 2TB of dynamic cache at an MSRP of $41,900, with 10TB Expansion Kits available at an MSRP of $27,900.
Press Release Source: BusinessWire.
