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Permabit archives your bulk data

Very scalable. Very, very protected

Filesystem and protection

Permabit has a global file system that can span across an entire grid, or customers can have separate file systems within each grid. What about spanning across grids? "We currently rely on third-party virtualisation solutions to provide the global view of our system, " Floyd said. "We are working on a future release that will span the file system across all grids...on integrating global file system technology into our product."

The idea is to make the use of Permabit's archival storage as transparent as possible to end users and applications. That would give the Nehalem processors something to chew on.

There is a RAID-EC protection scheme. How does this work? "It's actually RAIN (redundant array of independent nodes) rather than RAID. RAIN-EC leverages a patented erasure coding algorithm that allows for up to two simultaneous nodes failures, including any number of drives in these nodes. This is protection per grid, so multiple grids allows for multiple simultaneous failures in each grid."

What's the usable capacity of the 4010? "Each storage node has its 4TB of raw capacity," Floyd said. "A grid has a raw capacity of 144TB. Our combined data protection and file system overhead is approximately 35 per cent, but our technology incorporates deduplication. It is very typical for us to see over 4TB usable per storage node and 144TB usable per grid."

How about legal hold? "Permabit Enterprise Archive supports the ability to enforce retention of records on a file-by-file basis. Records are maintained in a non-modifiable, non-erasable manner for the time period specified by the administrator or application."

Floyd says there are more than 250 customers using Permabit archive products, some of them being cloud storage providers. "We see ourselves as an arms merchant to cloud storage - we can provide a stunningly low price with exceptional reliability upon which cloud service providers can build their services." A Permabit 4010 costs $250,000 for a 144TB configuration.

That's the Permabit pitch. Put the unstructured and semi-structured data that you have to keep into a purpose-built archive to keep it secure and protected for a better price per GB than anything else offering comparable facilities. ®

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