Imation Adding Nexsan Assureon 7

Imation Corp. launched its next generation object store, the Nexsan Assureon secure automated archive solution.

By consolidating storage tiers, securing data and simplifying storage management, the platform transforms the way organizations deploy and manage data archiving.

Government, healthcare and financial organizations in particular are challenged daily with managing rapid, unpredictable growth in digital content and data, while ensuring compliance with industry and government regulations. The Assureon solution brings secure automated archiving to mid-sized organizations and enterprises to optimize storage infrastructures and manage regulatory compliance. By deploying the solution, organizations can automate storage policies to encrypt, self-authenticate, self-manage, self-heal and self-configure storage for unstructured files and content.

"Archive automation is critical for organizations confronted with managing the costs, administration and growth of mandated secure retention of unstructured data," said Deni Connor, principal analyst, Storage Strategies NOW. "The Nexsan Assureon solution is a highly advanced archive storage platform, notable for the way it simplifies and automates data ingestion, and assures data integrity in a single hardware-software offering."

Unlike other competitive archiving solutions, Assureon does not require that applications be customized to use proprietary APIs in order to store their data in the archive. Users do not need to learn new processes or change how they access data.

"When we talk to IT leaders, we hear that organizations are challenged to manage exponentially increasing data sets, while complying with strict government and industry data retention and security requirements. The Assureon solution offers mid-sized organizations and enterprises a single, highly advanced, automated disk-archiving solution to secure and manage this data," said Mike Stolz, VP marketing for Imation’s Nexsan storage solutions. "Administrators can deploy the Assureon solution to manage their entire data protection architecture, controlling all critical data protection functionality, while shrinking storage infrastructure and its associated costs."

For Jack Henry & Associates Customers
The Assureon secure automated archive solution has been deployed with customers across a number of industries. For example, Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.‘s products and services are processing transactions, automating business processes, and managing mission-critical information for more than 11,600 financial institutions and corporate entities. Jack Henry & Associates deploys Assureon systems to provide fast, secure disk-based storage of check and document images for many of its banking and credit union customers delivered for in-house installations and as SaaS.

"When we were choosing a compliance storage solution for our customers, we looked at how the whole system was put together. With Assureon, we chose a best-of-breed solution that brings together the whole package   replication, retention, compliance and encryption. Their approach to data security and integrity is unmatched in the industry," said Randy Faith, manager of technical sales, Jack Henry & Associates.

Faith noted that the Assureon platform’s simple interface and "proactive" approach to data integrity are critical: "In this day and age, you can’t afford downtime. The Assureon solution monitors the data and the server for problems and sends proactive alerts to stop issues in advance. And if a server does go down, having the document and check images on the Assureon disks means you can recover the instant the new server is ready, a process that used to take weeks."

Assureon 7 improves performance and ease of use with:

• Virtual shortcuts deliver near-instant recovery: The solution allows users to recover quickly in the event of a server crash by simply installing the Assureon client software on a server. In addition, users now can deploy ‘virtual shortcuts’ with clustered NAS, allowing multiple servers to access Assureon files, enabling a redundant cluster configuration for faster recovery.
• Storage pools optimize disk space: The solution enables the file system to expand onto multiple disk arrays. This allows for more efficient use of disk space and simplifies system management.
• Next generation hardware platform delivers performance: The platform is now based on advanced processors and Nexsan E-Series high-density disk storage systems.
• Data ingestion throttling optimizes server performance: The Assureon server enables IT managers to optimize data ingestion speed with server load, ensuring efficient data transfer while maximizing server performance.
• Flexible ingestion options: Assureon offers a number of options for how data is collected and fed into the archive, including: via the network or cloud, using Assureon client software; via NAS-based Assureon Edge, a 2U server with options available for ingestion in Linux or Unix based environments (supporting both CIFS and NFS); or Assureon High Speed Edge, utilizing IB connections. In addition, options are available for ingestion via SnapLock Protocol, XML Ingestion File, and optional API integration to manage file retention and disposition.
• Administrator audit trail facilitates auditing: All configuration changes to the Assureon system are now tracked and recorded to facilitate auditing. The new audit trail feature provides a user interface for searching and filtering through audit records.

Available through a network of channel partners, the Assureon 7 secure automated archive solution can scale from 3TB to multiple petabytes of unstructured data.