Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance

Archive-enabled volumes also exist in cache but the data is subsequently migrated to UDO media dependant on the volume's settings. Usefully, you can stop changes being made to cached data by making it read only or by applying a write commit period in seconds, minutes or hours after which the file is closed to further modifications.

Multiple copies of cached data can be made and you can decide on an initial size for a volume and expand it later. For migration to occur you specify the amount of time a file must remain unchanged, a wait time that holds back migration if new files are added to the volume inside this period plus a minimum number of files and storage size criteria. User access can be strictly controlled with a local database or the appliance can use domain authentication and query an LDAP server. You can limit what each user is allowed to do by determining administrative rights for each share and apply storage quotas to them as well. For each share black and white lists can also be used which contain hostnames or IP addresses of those systems specifically allowed or denied access.

With the appliance rigged up to our Gigabit network we conducted testing using Windows Server 2003 and 2008 RC0 servers. With our test volumes configured for CIFS and FTP access we had no problems accessing them and mapping them as network shares. From here on you can use pretty much any archiving application you like as long as it supports mapped drives. Clearly, the appliance isn't going to match FC SANs for performance and we saw our CIFS file copies and restores returning averages of around 11MB/sec. FTP performance was also in the same ball park with Get and Put operations returning 11-12MB/sec. Archiving operations ran smoothly with our test files shifted onto WORM media to our specifications. To check power consumption we placed an in-line power meter on the appliance and saw it drawing around 140W. To compare this we put the meter on a dual Xeon 5160 storage server with eight high performance SAS hard disks and watched it settle at an energy sapping 440W - enough said, really.

General performance for the appliance may not be particularly good but this isn't such as issue with data archiving. The key features to focus on here are compliance, data integrity, ease of use and long term power consumption and in these areas the UDO Archive Appliance scores highly.