QStar Technologies announced today that it has joined the Active Archive Alliance as a founding partner. The Active Archive Alliance is a non-profit storage industry association dedicated to promoting active archives for simplified, online access to all archived data.

Organizations are archiving increasing amounts of data as they grapple with data growth, retention compliance rules and the need to leverage the knowledge and information within their organization. As organizations archive more data, the challenge of accessing that data when needed has intensified. Active archive solutions resolve this issue by turning offline archives into visible, accessible extensions of online storage systems – enabling fast, easy access to archived data.

The industry trend toward active archiving is being enabled and accelerated by recent advancements in active archive applications as well as archive tape and disk storage technologies. Today’s innovative applications provide the ability to see and access data on tape through a file system interface, making it easy and affordable to view and search archived data files in large heterogeneous online active tape and disk storage pools.

“QStar is excited to be a founding member of the Active Archive Alliance,” said Dave Thomson, senior vice president of sales, QStar Technologies. “Our company has exclusively offered solutions in the archive world for more than 23 years and completely endorses the messages involved in Active Archiving, namely combining disk and tape technologies to maximize the benefits of each. An active archive offers optimized performance and data security for an organization’s most valuable resource: its data.”

QStar offers a wide range of data migration and archiving software solutions that allow organizations to tailor-make a cost-effective archive that precisely fits their individual requirements. Specifically designed for mixed system and data types, QStar supports the entire enterprise, including servers and clients using Windows, Linux, UNIX and Mac. The product suite also allows for storage and retrieval to disk and tape solutions situated locally or, for disaster prevention purposes, remotely.

QStar’s Network Migrator software utilizes advanced policy management for storage virtualization and data lifecycle management. Data Director HSM software, built for enterprise level archives, creates a virtual hard disk system on tape media and mirrors it for disaster prevention. QStar solutions work to create secure archives that allow seamless access to data using standard interfaces and protocols across the network.

Active archiving eliminates the typical trade-off between keeping data visible in online disk arrays and moving the data to more cost-effective near-line or off-line tape. It enables organizations to keep all archive data online, searchable and quickly accessible, while ensuring media and data integrity and simplified management.

In addition to QStar, founding technology partners of the Active Archive Alliance include Compellent Technologies, FileTek Inc., and Spectra Logic Corporation.

The mission of the Active Archive Alliance is to provide organizations with the best practices, tools and information they need to achieve simplified access to the online storage of their archived data. Please visit www.activearchive.com for more information about the Active Archive Alliance and to become a member.