Floyd Christofferson, Chairman, Active Archive Alliance

The Active Archive Alliance has appointed Floyd Christofferson, director of storage product marketing at SGI, as chairman of its board.

A founding member of the organization, Christofferson has served on the board since April 2010 and brings more than 25 years of content management and storage workflow experience to the role.

“The rapid growth of data today puts tremendous strain on traditional, silo-oriented approaches to storage and management. Budget pressures in IT combined with the increasing need to have immediate online access to larger amounts of data merely compounds this problem,” said Christofferson. “The Active Archive Alliance brings together best-of-breed storage technology companies, each with innovative solutions to enable easy access to all data, while also reducing complexity and cost. Over the past four years, active archiving has entered the IT lexicon as a widely-embraced approach for large-scale data management and retention. I am pleased to assume the role of Alliance chairman and to help further advocate on behalf of our members and active archive customers.”

In an analog world, an archive is where old content goes to retire. In a digital world, all data is potentially valuable and needs to be rapidly available, protected and easy to manage. An active archive does just that – breaking down the barriers between long term and primary storage, and in the process reducing the IT overhead required to manage it.

Active archives are for organizations that face data growth or regularly manage high-volume unstructured data or digital assets – markets such as life sciences, media and entertainment, education, research, government, financial services, oil and gas, and telecommunications, as well as general IT organizations requiring online data archive options.

Active archiving provides a single, online file system that spans multiple types of storage (flash, disk, tape libraries and other storage technologies) and gives users real-time access to unstructured data stored for both immediate needs and for long-term retention. Active archives enable the lowest cost per TB technology for acquisition and operational costs, can reduce migration costs going forward, and decrease energy consumption and space requirements.

Christofferson succeeds Molly Rector, formerly with Spectra Logic. Betsy Doughty, senior marketing director at Spectra Logic now represents Spectra Logic on the board.

 Christofferson is the director of storage product marketing at SGI. As a professional focused on content management and storage workflows over the last 25 years, he has paid particular attention to the technology associated with management of massive volumes of data, both from the perspective of hardware strategies and of workflow.

At SGI, he works closely with the core storage hardware and software engineering teams to leverage SGI’s innovation in addressing the world’s largest data management problems. This is increasingly focused on providing modular, scalable solutions to help SGI’s customers effectively manage the exponential growth of data in technical computing, cloud and Internet, and persistent data environments. Prior to joining SGI, his work was focused in the broadcast industry, where he was focused on file-based content management and distribution strategies.