GridBank

The flagship offering from Tarmin Technologies is GridBank, a clustered archiving platform specifically geared towards the long-term storage of fixed content. The CAS-based software system leverages commodity hardware and storage, including--DAS, SAN, or NAS--and can scale up to a potential 20 PB of data or 32 billion stored objects.

As a CAS-based system, GridBank ensures single instance storage of files by hashing the file contents prior to storage and comparing the resulting signature to already stored files. Both the file's content and its metadata are stored; and the metadata can additionally contain an administrator defined lifecycle policy governing the file's migration schedule, retention period, shredding, and access policies. Metadata can then be searched (content indexes are also available for searching) and objects retrieved as and when needed via a Web-based "search-engine" like interface. Additionally, the archive can be programatically accessed via HTTP, FTP, CIFS or NFS protocols. The vendor states that once the file is inserted into the archive, its stored policies are automatically enforced by the platform.

GridBank employs both a "Service Grid" layer (the physical, clustered nodes that manage the archive) as well as a storage layer (the underlying storage that the nodes are managing). The Service Grid exposes a single global namespace to the client applications, such that the physical data can be moved as needed across the physical storage without effecting a client's ability to access that data. The vendor notes that the clustered platform is able to automatically recognize the addition of new grid nodes and load balance data accordingly. Data is stored across multiple nodes such that the failure of individual nodes will not cause data loss.

Other platform features include support for role-based access; support for data encryption; support for global, user, application, or item-level policy definitions; support for legal holds; and symmetrical, distributed processing across grid nodes (each node contains information both about the content it is managing directly as well as content that is being managed by other nodes).

GridBank is available now; pricing starts at $35,000 (list price) with a 2 TB license. Visit the Tarmin Technologies Web site for further information.