PRESS CONTACT:
Jonathan Buckley
VP of Marketing
408-969-7152
jbuckley@powerfile.com
POWERFILE® SETS STANDARD FOR ARCHIVE STORAGE
DENSITY, SCALABILITY, AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY WITH
NEW ACTIVE ARCHIVE APPLIANCE™ ENTERPRISE EDITION
Appliance Leverages Next-Generation Blu-ray Disc™ Technology to Deliver 70 Terabytes per Rack, 120
Terabytes per Appliance, and Industry-Leading Energy Efficiency of 500 Terabytes per Kilowatt
SANTA CLARA, CA, August 6, 2007 – PowerFile®, an innovator in archive appliances for
permanent storage of digital content and assets, today announced the introduction of the
Active Archive Appliance™ (A3™) Enterprise Edition, the industry’s most energy efficient
system for online data storage. Building on the momentum of an award-winning product
line that continues to redefine archival storage, PowerFile’s third generation appliance
incorporates industry-standard Blu-ray Disc™ technology from Panasonic to increase
density by a factor of six to an enterprise-class 70TB in a 42U rack enclosure. By
introducing an entirely new approach to keeping fixed content data - such as documents,
images, and media files - accessible on the network and ‘active’, PowerFile is uniquely able to
offer a fully configured 120TB appliance that consumes less than 240W of power1.
Game Changing Platform
Prior to the recent introduction of Blu-ray, standard optical storage technologies had not
kept pace with the densities of disk- and tape-based alternatives making it impossible for
optical-based systems to meet the storage requirements of large enterprises with hundreds of
1 120TB A3 Enterprise systems consume 236W at idle and 298W at 25% duty cycle.
terabytes of data. Blu-ray changes all that by offering 50GB of storage on a single DVDsized disc with a technology roadmap that promises 200GB per disc. This order of
magnitude increase in density is what enables PowerFile to offer up to 70TB of storage in a
standard 42U rack enclosure and up to 120TB per appliance, making the A3 Enterprise
Edition the most compelling storage solution to leverage optical media in over a decade.
Nothing Proprietary
The A3 Enterprise Edition continues with PowerFile’s tradition of utilizing industry
standards to deliver solutions where customers own their data – not their storage vendor.
Through strict adherence of standard network access protocols, standard media formats, and
standard file structures, the A3 Enterprise Edition completely eliminates the risk of vendor
lock-in – a major concern with leading fixed-content solutions such as Content Addressable
Storage (CAS) that restrict data access to custom Application Programming Interfaces
(APIs) and store data in proprietary formats.
Industry-Leading Energy Efficiency
With 97% of data centers expected to be out of power by 2011 and storage consuming
almost 40% of data center power2, keeping information online and accessible is becoming an
increasingly difficult challenge for large organizations. PowerFile’s unique approach of
dynamically caching most frequently accessed data and preserving archives in a virtualized,
massive array of Blu-ray media allows the A3 Enterprise Edition to provide the online
accessibility of disk-based alternatives while consuming less than 5% of the power. In fact,
the A3 Enterprise Edition is so energy efficient that it consumes less than 20% of the power
required for leading Massive Array of Idle Disks (MAID) solutions3 that have been
specifically designed to reduce energy consumption.
“Chief Information Officers at Fortune 500 organizations are managing underutilized data
centers due to power constraints and ever expanding storage requirements, creating an
immediate need for more energy efficient storage technologies,” said Kirk Dunn, CEO of
PowerFile. “These large organizations are starting to realize that the cost to power and cool
2
3
Source: Liebert Systems, Inc. and Gartner, Inc.
Source: Copan Systems
infrequently accessed information on spinning disk can quickly exceed the acquisition cost of
the equipment. The energy efficiency of the A3 Enterprise Edition is so compelling that it
has been approved for customer incentives by some of the largest utility providers including
Pacific Gas and Electric Company of California.”
“IT professionals are coming to recognize the enormous storage capacity of Blu-ray media
and the reliability of our drives make them a natural fit for enterprise archiving applications,”
said Robin Sweeten, Group Manager, Strategic Marketing for the Panasonic Industrial
Company. Panasonic is pleased to be a part of PowerFile's highly innovative archiving
solution which answers the critical storage needs of large organizations with an
environmentally conscious, energy-efficient design. This is a great example of "Blu" actually
contributing to a "green" product.
Unmatched Reliability
In addition to extensive qualifications of “archive-grade” Write Once, Read Many (WORM)
media that protects important information from accidental erasure, unauthorized
modification, data corruption and viruses, PowerFile has developed patented and patentpending technologies that give the A3 Enterprise Edition industry-leading data integrity that
is 1,000 times more reliable than enterprise tape or disk-based RAID4.
“As the world’s largest private cancer center and one of the nation’s premier biomedical
research institutions, providing reliable access to critical research data is vital to our success,”
said Juany Jardines, Director of Research Computing for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center. “We have millions of high-resolution digital images that need to be reliably preserved
forever. PowerFile’s A3 Enterprise Edition offered the permanence, reliability, online
accessibility, and ease-of-use we need at a fraction of the cost of alternative disk-based
archiving solutions.”
4 Metric: Unrecoverable Errors on Read (UERs). Dual-parity, redundant array of independent disks (RAID 6) and
enterprise-class tape (LTO-3) have been estimated to deliver UERs of 10-17. PowerFile has tested the Active Archive
Appliance (A3) patent-pending error correction scheme to have a 99.99999% probability of delivering UERs of 10-20.
Pricing and Availability
The A3 Enterprise Edition Base System provides 10TB of archive capacity and 2TB of
dynamic cache at an MSRP of $41,900, with 10TB Expansion Kits available at an MSRP of
$27,900. The A3 is currently available through a large number of value added resellers in
North America working through such distributors such as Ingram Micro and Cranel
Imaging.
About PowerFile
PowerFile, Inc. is the innovator in archive appliances for permanent storage of digital
content and assets. The company’s award-winning solutions combine the speed and
simplicity of online access with better economics and integrity compared to traditional
archives, empowering organizations of all sizes to efficiently manage, secure, and preserve
valuable digital assets. PowerFile's product offerings combine intelligent storage
management software and sophisticated file management with cost-effective, robust
hardware to deliver integrated, active, easy-to-use archive solutions.
About Panasonic Industrial
Panasonic Industrial Company provides electronic components and design solutions to
leading manufacturers in the consumer electronics, telecommunications, computer, and
home appliance industries, among others. The company is a sales division of Panasonic
Corporation of North America, the principal North America subsidiary of Matsushita
Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (NYSE: MC). For more information on Panasonic visit our
website at www.panasonic.com/industrial
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©2007 PowerFile, Inc. PowerFile, the PowerFile logo, Active Archive Appliance, and the A3 logo are trademarks or registered
trademarks of PowerFile Inc. in the U.S.A. and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective
companies. Information is subject to change without notice.