PowerFile Inc. on Monday announced that it has added Blu-ray disk technology to the latest version of its Active Archive Appliance, part of its effort to move beyond the limits of DVD in scaling the optical-based storage offering.
The Active Archive Appliance Enterprise Edition, or A3, utilizes Blu-ray media from Panasonic Industrial Co., which boosts the optical storage density in the appliance to 120TB per appliance. The new version is now shipping.
Jonathan Buckley, vice president of marketing at Santa Clara, Calif.-based PowerFile, said the company expects to further boost the capacity of the appliance to 160TB in six months. Previous versions of Active Archive, which used DVD technology, supported only 12TB of data per rack, he noted.
The company said the updated appliance is positioned as an alternative to disk-based archiving systems for storing fixed content.
Jason Lewis, IT manager at Petaluma, Calif.-based Erickson Productions Inc., has been running A3 in production for about a month, after a successful beta trial. He said he has the online storage system configured with two storage libraries holding 200 media disks apiece, providing his Macintosh environment with about 40TB of capacity to store space-hungry stock photography images and files.
