Plasmon Launches New UDO Archive Appliance At CeBIT 2006
Plasmon (LSE: PLM), the market leader for professional archival storage solutions, today announced its new UDO Archive Appliance at CeBIT 2006 in Hannover, Germany. This new solution is a major addition to the Plasmon archival storage product line and is the first to merge Plasmon's UDO® (Ultra Density Optical) and RAID technologies in a fully integrated, tiered storage solution. The UDO Archive Appliance combines the performance of RAID with the longevity and authenticity of UDO in a single product that meets corporate policies and industry regulations for data archives.
With more than 50 installations at hospitals worldwide, this extended version of the UDO Archive Appliance has already proven itself in the medical imaging market and is now bringing the same safe, secure, long-term data storage to the much wider email, data and content management market. According to Sanjay Shah, vice president and CIO at Cabell Huntington Hospital: "The Archive Appliance was the optimal solution that met all of our requirements for HIPAA compliance, security, fast access, longevity and cost."
The unique tiered architecture of the UDO Archive Appliance is based on a network attached interface that is simple to install and configure. Data is cached on RAID for quick access, immediately committed to UDO for long-term retention, and can also be taken off-line for archive expansion and low-cost disaster recovery. UDO is the standard for data archiving. As a non-volatile optical technology with an extremely long life, UDO requires no proactive media maintenance and the Write Once format ensures record authenticity that is far superior to magnetic disk and tape technology.
"As firms work to enhance their data retention guidelines in response to regulatory and corporate governance requirements, they need solutions that would allow them to effectively enforce retention (including approved data deletion) policies throughout the organization's tiered-storage environment," said Vivian Tero, senior research analyst at IDC. "Solutions like Plasmon's UDO Archive Appliance that help companies effectively manage retention schedules while leveraging existing storage capabilities like network attached storage will play a major role in corporate compliance efforts."
Unlike some archive products that use a proprietary interface, the UDO Archive Appliance has a standard file system interface, making it easy to integrate with third-party applications. In addition to the already-established medical imaging market, new applications for the UDO Archive Appliance include document imaging and capture, content management and e-mail archiving.
"Building on our success with medical imaging integrators, we are looking forward to making the benefits of the new UDO Archive Appliance available to a much wider application and customer audience," commented Nigel Street, CEO at Plasmon. "The UDO Archive Appliance blends the strengths of standard industry components in an easy to integrate package that is extremely reliable and economical. It's a compelling architecture, which addresses the demands of a record archive in a way that magnetic disk and tape archives cannot."
Pricing and Availability
The Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance is currently available, and pricing is dependant upon configuration and size for the Entry, Midrange and Enterprise models.
About Plasmon
Plasmon is a leader in professional archival storage solutions, providing the industry's most comprehensive line of archival storage solutions based on UDO drives and media, optical libraries and storage management software. Customers include corporations, institutions and government agencies worldwide and are backed by a global service and support network. Founded in 1984, Plasmon is listed on the London Stock Exchange, (LSE: PLM). Worldwide headquarters are in Cambridge, United Kingdom with major manufacturing facilities in Cork, Ireland and Colorado, USA. Plasmon has regional sales offices throughout Europe and North America. For more information, visit www.plasmon.com.