Storage firm Plasmon has announced plans to simplify data archives by making such systems independent of the underlying storage. In future, firms will be able to migrate archived data from one medium to another as necessary, the company said.
Plasmon's current system uses its Enterprise Active Archive (EAA) software to manage data held on Plasmon Archive Appliances. An updated version, available immediately, now supports a mixed storage subsystem of UDO optical storage and magnetic disks.

This is the first step towards a virtualised archive architecture, according to European marketing director Steve Tongish.

"We're abstracting the EAA to manage any kind of data repository beneath it, " he said. In a decade, solid state disks may be the most cost-effective storage, and Plasmon aims to let customers simply plug in drive arrays and have the EAA migrate data across automatically, he added.

The EAA already checks and categorises data, and can apply policies such as destroying data that has reached the end of its retention period. In future, the EAA will link better with document management software to let such tools control retention, Tongish said.

Pricing for a 10 terabyte EAA system starts at £95,000, while a Plasmon Archive Appliance with this capacity starts at £61,000.