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By Kevin Komiega
February 6, 2007—Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) increased its presence in the content archiving and management market today when the company announced that it has signed a deal to acquire privately held digital archiving specialist Archivas. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
HDS already offers an archiving platform that incorporates Archivas technology. The Hitachi Content Archive Platform (HCAP) provides users with an active archive solution for secure retention, preservation, and verifiable destruction of content under common and unified archive services, such as centralized search, policy-based retention, authentication and protection.
HDS has plans to build on the HCAP platform to offer further capabilities for the search, management, and archiving of unstructured data across heterogeneous content management systems.
"This acquisition extends Hitachi's capabilities in managing, searching, tiering, and protecting unstructured data environments," says Jack Domme, executive vice president, global solutions strategy and development, at HDS.
HDS and Archivas have been working together since the two companies entered into a content archiving partnership in 2005. The partnership consisted of a worldwide product development and distribution agreement.
Archivas' archiving software, Archivas Cluster (ArC), simultaneously indexes metadata and content as files are written to the archive, with the built-in ability to extract text and metadata from 370 file formats and 77 languages.
ArC also provides event-based updating of the full text and metadata index as retention status changes or as files are deleted. ArC software can currently scale up to 80 cluster nodes, with the ability to manage 30 million files per node. By supporting underlying disk volumes up to 2TB, an Archivas Cluster can now support a single, global namespace with 2.5 petabytes of capacity and the ability to manage more than 2 billion files.
HDS seems to be throwing down the gauntlet and taking direct aim at EMC in the digital archiving market. EMC has built its archiving portfolio through a combination of software acquisitions and in-house product development. The cornerstone of EMC's archiving solution is the Centera content-addressed storage (CAS) system, which can be wrapped in archiving software, including EMC's EmailXtender, DiskXtender, and DatabaseXtender product families. EMC's archiving solutions also work with all leading third-party archiving hardware and software platforms.
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