Jonathan Buckley
VP of Marketing
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POWERFILE® SETS STANDARD FOR ARCHIVE STORAGE DENSITY, SCALABILITY, AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY WITH NEW ACTIVE ARCHIVE APPLIANCE™ ENTERPRISE EDITION
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
SANTA CLARA, CA, August 6, 2007 – 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. Building on the momentum of an award-winning product line that continues to redefine archival 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 power[1].
Game Changing Platform
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 over a decade.
Nothing Proprietary
The A3 Enterprise Edition continues with PowerFile’s tradition of utilizing industry standards to deliver solutions where customers own their data – not their storage vendor. Through strict adherence of standard network access protocols, standard media formats, and standard file structures, the A3 Enterprise Edition completely eliminates the risk of vendor lock-in – a major concern with leading fixed-content solutions such as Content Addressable Storage (CAS) that restrict data access to custom Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and store data in proprietary formats.
Industry-Leading Energy Efficiency
With 97% of data centers expected to be out of power by 2011 and storage consuming almost 40% of data center power[2], 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) solutions[3] that have been specifically designed to reduce energy consumption.
“Chief Information Officers at Fortune 500 organizations are managing underutilized data centers due to power constraints and ever expanding storage requirements, creating an immediate need for more energy efficient storage technologies,” said Kirk Dunn, CEO of PowerFile. “These large organizations are starting to realize that the cost to power and cool infrequently accessed information on spinning disk can quickly exceed the acquisition cost of the equipment. The energy efficiency of the A3 Enterprise Edition is so compelling that it has been approved for customer incentives by some of the largest utility providers including Pacific Gas and Electric Company of California.”
“IT professionals are coming to recognize the enormous storage capacity of Blu-ray media and the reliability of our drives make them a natural fit for enterprise archiving applications,” said Robin Sweeten, Group Manager, Strategic Marketing for the Panasonic Industrial Company. Panasonic is pleased to be a part of PowerFile's highly innovative archiving solution which answers the critical storage needs of large organizations with an environmentally conscious, energy-efficient design. This is a great example of "Blu" actually contributing to a "green" product.
Unmatched Reliability
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 RAID[4].
“As the world’s largest private cancer center and one of the nation’s premier biomedical research institutions, providing reliable access to critical research data is vital to our success,” said Juany Jardines, Director of Research Computing for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. “We have millions of high-resolution digital images that need to be reliably preserved forever. PowerFile’s A3 Enterprise Edition offered the permanence, reliability, online accessibility, and ease-of-use we need at a fraction of the cost of alternative disk-based archiving solutions.”
Pricing and Availability
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. The A3 is currently available through a large number of value added resellers in North America working through such distributors such as Ingram Micro and Cranel Imaging.
About PowerFile
PowerFile, Inc. is the innovator in archive appliances for permanent storage of digital content and assets. The company’s award-winning solutions combine the speed and simplicity of online access with better economics and integrity compared to traditional archives, empowering organizations of all sizes to efficiently manage, secure, and preserve valuable digital assets. PowerFile's product offerings combine intelligent storage management software and sophisticated file management with cost-effective, robust hardware to deliver integrated, active, easy-to-use archive solutions.
About Panasonic Industrial
Panasonic Industrial Company provides electronic components and design solutions to leading manufacturers in the consumer electronics, telecommunications, computer, and home appliance industries, among others. The company is a sales division of Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal North America subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (NYSE: MC). For more information on Panasonic visit our website at www.panasonic.com/industrial
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©2007 PowerFile, Inc. PowerFile, the PowerFile logo, Active Archive Appliance, and the A3 logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of PowerFile Inc. in the U.S.A. and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Information is subject to change without notice.
[1] 120TB A3 Enterprise systems consume 236W at idle and 298W at 25% duty cycle.
[2] Source: Liebert Systems, Inc. and Gartner, Inc.
[3] Source: Copan Systems
[4] Metric: Unrecoverable Errors on Read (UERs). Dual-parity, redundant array of independent disks (RAID 6) and enterprise-class tape (LTO-3) have been estimated to deliver UERs of 10-17. PowerFile has tested the Active Archive Appliance (A3) patent-pending error correction scheme to have a 99.99999% probability of delivering UERs of 10-20.