PowerFile Turns Blu To Go Green

August 28, 2007: PowerFile is jumping on the Blu-ray train, announcing the release of a new enterprise archival appliance that it claims can deliver up to 120 terabytes of storage, and 500 terabytes per kilowatt.

The company claims its Active Archive Appliance (A3) Enterprise Edition is the industry’s most energy efficient online data storage system, largely thanks to its use of Blu-ray technology to increase storage density by a factor of six.

PowerFile says this bumps out its enterprise storage offering to 70TB per 42U rack enclosure, and thanks to a new approach to keeping fixed content storage (such as documents, images and media files) online and active, it claims the A3 can offer a 120TB appliance that consumes less than 240W of power.

While cutting power costs is important to everyone’s bottom lines, PowerFile goes beyond this, claiming that by 2011 97 percent of data centres are expected to max out all available power, with storage consuming almost 40 percent. The company says that the A3 will help data centres keep information online and accessible as it dynamically caches most frequently accessed data and preserves archives in a virtualized array of Blu-ray media. This enables it to provide online accessibility similar to disk-based alternatives while consuming less than 5% of the power.

According to Panasonic Strategic Marketing Group Manager Robin Sweeten PowerFile’s A3 archiving solution answers the storage needs of large organisations with an environmentally conscious design. “This is a great example of ‘Blu’ actually contributing to a ‘green’ product,” said Sweeten.

Next to its power saving and capacity leaps, PowerFile also points out the technology’s compliance credentials as an “archive-grade” Write Once, Read Many (WORM) media. Once data is written to disk it is protected from accidental erasure, modification, corruption and viruses. To go another step further though, the company boldly claims that it has developed new data integrity technology 1,000 times more reliable than enterprise tape or disk-based RAID4.

Until the introduction of Blu-ray, optical storage technology was being left far behind disk and tape storage densite, limiting the medium’s usefulness in enterprise applications. With 50GB per disk now and 200GB planned for the future, the company says that optical technology is now back in the permanent storage game.

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