Interestingly while it may seem that the archive and SSD markets have nothing in common they actually have one very common goal; the death of primary storage as we know it. While I will officially announce the death of fibre channel drives in an upcoming blog on either Byte and Switch or Information Week, you just got a preview. 

Disk Archive's roll in this is to get as much data off of primary storage as possible. Let's face it, primary storage is bloated with data that has not been accessed in years. According to nearly every study it is as much as 80%. Disk archives can give you a safe place to put it -- even safer than backup, as we describe in our article Backup vs. Archive -- and get it off of primary storage and out of your day-to-day management overhead.

Permabit, by breaking the $1 per GB barrier, makes it even harder to justify using primary storage for old data. The price delta is too great! With this update, Permabit begins to use 1TB drives, doubling individual storage node capacity to 4TB's, meaning that the Data Center Series cluster can now scale from 32TB's starting capacity to 4.6PB's! While 4.6PB's may sound like a lot, when you consider these factors: growth rate of data, increasing number of regulations around data retention, bringing back old data for research purposes and cost effectively and safely storing this data, and still having it readily accessible, the amount of storage space needed increases exponentially.

The new release also improves performance by combining software enhancements and the latest Intel processors; Permabit claims a 280% increase in performance further increasing the workload profiles that the Data Center Series can handle.

Permabit is even showing some green. Disk archive, even without power saving features, is greener typically than primary storage by delivering significantly more capacity per watt and in less physical space. In this release, Permabit has been able to move to a single quad core processor in each node as opposed to the previous version that had two dual core processors.  This results in a reduction of power consumption by 70% per node.

Further, the Permabit Enterprise Archive Data Center Series already includes disk archive specific features such as: retention, file level WORM, deduplication, compression and their RAIN-EC protection.  The Permabit solution can be a key component of a storage strategy, even if you are going to keep fibre channel drives.