Permabit Doubles Archiving Capacity, Lowers Price

In a clear enterprise bid, Permabit has unveiled a new version of its archiving system that more than doubles the vendor's previous capacity, while actually reducing its price per Gbyte of raw disk storage.

Up to now, Permabit has offered archiving systems of up to 40 Tbytes, racked in clusters from four to 20 nodes. Now, the vendor is offering a 96-Tbyte system that can reach 3 Pbytes when up to 32 racks are clustered.

Permabit says its legacy systems, now renamed the Enterprise Archive Business Series, start at $55,000 for 4 Tbytes. The new Data Center Series starts at $75,000 for 10 Tbytes. Taking into consideration the size and pricing of all systems in each series, Permabit says the average cost-per-Gbyte for the Business Series is about $8, while the new Data Center series averages about $5 per Gbyte.

Data reduction brings those costs down to about 33 cents to $2.33 per Gbyte for the Data Center Series, Permabit claims. The vendor compares that with a self-set industry average range of $25 to $75 per Gbyte.

While some of this is clearly math serving marketing with tough-to-prove specifics, at least one source says Permabit's chief claim -- to offer humongous archiving space at lower prices than before -- is solid. "While the industry average may be smaller than Permabit claims, and its savings smaller, the delta is legitimate," says one industry analyst, who asked not to be named.The data reduction features that Permabit touts include technology the supplier calls Scalable Data Reduction (SDR), which comprises subfile segmentation, compression, and in-line de-duplication using an algorithm based on SHA-256 hashing approved for U.S. government use. SDR has been a feature of Permabit systems previously.

Permabit also boasts a data protection function called RAIN-EC, which Permabit says exceeds RAID-6 redundancy for failed components. And Permabit has added more horsepower to its I/O and claims to reach hundreds of Mbit/s in throughput by adding 15-Mbytes/s access modules incrementally to match customer requirements.

Permabit faces a multitude of disk-based archiving competitors, also eager to market their wares to the enterprise space. Among these are Data Domain, EMC with Centera, HDS with HCAP, HP with RISS, and NEC with Hydrastor.

All of these vendors make claims similar to Permabit's. EMC's Centera, for instance, supports up to 380 Tbytes of raw storage when four cabinets are clustered, though EMC also insists that multiple clusters can provide Pbytes of capacity. Centera is priced from about $77,000.

At least one analyst says Permabit has some features that distinguish it from the crowd. "Permabit is going after the very high end of the archiving market (specifically those needing 100 Tbytes)," writes IDC analyst Benjamin Woo in an email today. The use of a grid architecture with data distribution and protection technology are aimed at overcoming performance problems encountered by high-capacity disk arrays, he notes. These features are shared most closely by NEC's Hydrastor, in his view.When it comes to data reduction, Woo finds Permabit's combination of data de-duplication with in-line compression noteworthy: "This results in greater storage efficiencies which in turn can significantly reduce the cost of useable storage capacity."

On the downside, Permabit has no proof to back up any of its claims for the new Data Center Series. It can provide no input or testimony from customers of any size. Until that happens, talk of the new products' capabilities remains just talk.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.