Features and functions of OPENARCHIVE

OPENARCHIVE offers all the functions of ARCHIVEMANAGER, except for two features. There can be no audit compliance according to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (GDPdu and GoBS in Germany) because publishing the  source code would be detrimental to those legal requirements. And, at the present time, no independent software manufacturers (ISV) have yet certified their applications for OPENARCHIVE.

FREELY SCALEABLE

OPENARCHIVE can be scaled according to your needs. Archive capacities from 1 terabyte up to several petabytes can be administrated.

HARDWARE INDEPENDENCE

No matter which hardware components you want to use, all devices can be easily integrated: for example, archive disks, performance disks and/or LTO-based tape archives from any manufacturer.

COST EFFECTIVENESS

Existing RAID systems, as well as LTO libraries, can also be used as archive capacities.

OPEN INTERFACE

OPENARCHIVE communicates with Windows and Unix servers via CIFS or NFS. There is no need for a proprietary API.

TRANSPARENCY

OPENARCHIVE does not alter the structure of the file system directory, so all users and operators can retrieve their data exactly as they did in the past.

STORAGE POOLS

Wherever you want to store your data, OPENARCHIVE enables you to conceive the architecture of your archive in whatever combination you prefer: disk/disk, disk/tape, tape/tape, disk/tape/disk, disk/tape/tape, etc.

DATA SECURITY

The utmost care has been taken with the security features to assure that your data is kept as safe as possible. You can save as many copies as you want – onsite and/or remotely on disk and/or tape. For your peace of mind, metadata are stored in a redundant system, thus guaranteeing rapid recovery in the event of an emergency.

Example Configuration 

Assumption

A customer wants an universal archiving solution to handle their heterogeneous applications: Windows Fileserver, E-mail server, Document Management System (DMS) application server and a UNIX-based CAD engineering solution.

Goal

To establish a secure long-term archive with as little investment as possible.

Solution

ISV software products are already in existence to handle the e-mail, file and DMS applications. So far, these products are archiving the data locally on jukeboxes or disk-based systems. In future this data is written centrally to OPENARCHIVE which keeps it available on a performance disk for – let's say – twelve months but at the same time also stores several copies locally on tape and SATA. To be on the safe side, an additional copy is written to tape in a second computer center. The existing SAN disk system is used as performance disk. The disk archive ensures rapid access and the two – or as many as wanted – additional tape copies provide additional security.

Result

Installation of the free OPENARCHIVE software; investments in a SATA RAID system which is partitioned for email, DMS and Fileserver data and an Intel-based server. The existing SAN system, used as performance disk, and existing backup LTO-libraries were integrated into the solution.