New Version of Compressed Archive Software NParchive by Clearpace

UK archive store specialists Clearpace have released a new version of their compressed archive generation software NParchive, which includes a full SDK and expanded support for Microsoft SQL Server.

  NParchive – Structured Data retention

“The new NParchive Integration Pack enables software vendors to address one of their customer’s most pressing needs – controlling data and storage growth,” said John Bantleman, CEO of Clearpace. “The database vendors are increasingly acknowledging the performance and storage issues of bloated application databases, and we’ve responded by delivering a simple mechanism for the software vendors driving this data growth, to offload historical data into an archive store. We have effectively built a plug-in ‘archive adapter’ which enables seamless integration of business applications with a highly compressed archive store that is searchable via native queries, time proofed and completely auditable.”

Many industries are now required by law to retain large volumes of structured data, such as trading information or communications data, for long periods of time. The NParchive Integration Pack enables developers to integrate the systems generating this data with NParchive, and programmatically load data into a compressed archive, administer the archive and query the archived data using a Java API. NParchive’s ability to deduplicate, compress and archive data onto any storage platform – from all major databases – provides unique opportunities for software developers to build unified data archive stores for their clients.

“We recently integrated NParchive from Clearpace into our product suite to support our archiving strategy” said Brendan Dillon, CTO of Adaptive Mobile, “the whole process was remarkably easy taking less than 3 weeks from beginning to end, and our archiving solution was immediately deployable in production."

In addition to the flexible Integration Pack, in version 2.5 Clearpace has enhanced the core capabilities of NParchive. LDAP and Active Directory authentication has been introduced to simplify deployment and eliminate the need to replicate security infrastructure.

A new advanced audit trail and logging system has been added, where Clearpace’s own technology generates logs of every event or action applied to the data archive. These log files are fully searchable using standard reporting tools or query languages, ensuring a full audit trail is available for regulatory compliance.

Microsoft SQL server support has also been extended. MS-SQL data types, functions and DDL are now implemented, so that NParchive can import data directly from MS-SQL databases and generate archive stores which appear to be part of the Microsoft SQL database environment. This enables archived data to be queried via standard Microsoft interfaces, and reports to run unmodified against archived data.

NParchive 2.5 with the Integration Pack, which includes code samples, full developer documentation; plus template end user documentation and training materials, is available from the 22nd of October 2008.