Another archiving alliance — Atempo and Permabit

Atempo has been busy lately working its archiving story. Over the last six weeks, the backup software vendor has released an email archiving application and forged partnerships with Nexsan, Nirvana and - as of today - Permabit.

Atempo and Permabit say they’ve completed interoperability testing of the Atempo Digital Archive (ADA) file archiving software solution with the Permabit Enterprise Archive disk-based storage system.

While such partnerships have become common for smaller storage vendors looking to take on larger players, a partner has to bring something to the table to make it worthwhile. For Permabit, Atempo adds support for user-initiated (along with admin-initiated) archiving and the ability to archive Mac and Windows files in the same repository.

“Now shops can have admins set policies as well as user-set retention rules, and they don’t have to step all over each other,” Permabit director of product marketing Louis Imershein said.

Imershein said while Permabit’s customers tend to be enterprises, most of them have Macs somewhere — usually in the art or graphics departments. He said ADA makes it easier to manage archives regardless of what type of applications are used. “It’s a nice way to re-direct users to the archive without having to go through a filter drive, they can make a direct hop,” he said. “In enterprises, you wonder how people can do without that.”

Analyst George Crump of Storage Switzerland agrees that Mac support is becoming important in large companies. “I’m seeing an uptick in use of Macintoshes, even in the enterprise,” he said. Crump is also seeing a need for simpler interfaces such as ADA’s in archiving. “Many applications are too heavy — for lack of a better word — and they bring more to the table than needed,” he said. “Disk-based archiving simplifies archiving compared to tape and optical archiving. But there wasn’t a simpler app to take advantage of the simpler interface.”

But with no shortage of archiving products in the market now, getting people to take a look at their simple products will be the hard part for little guys like Atempo and Permabit.