ARKIVIO :: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Who is Arkivio, Inc.?

Founded in December 2000, Arkivio, Inc. is a private software company based in Mountain View, California that offers enterprise storage management software solutions for automating the management of data and information over its lifecycle.

What is Information Lifecycle Management?

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) is all about understanding the value of your data and having your data in the right storage resource at the right time, while optimizing cost, performance, and availability within your storage infrastructure. Much of the basic technology exists today, such as data discovery, monitoring and reporting tools, classification/valuation schemes, data movers, and policy engines.

The key elements of an ILM solution include an assessment of the value and utilization of existing data and storage resources, the organization and classification of resourced based on business requirements, and the automated migration and placement of data to the most appropriate storage asset based on established data retention policies. ILM enables customers to achieve a variety of storage management objectives such as regulatory compliance, data movement to inexpensive storage, consolidation, and backup / recovery optimization.

What ILM products does Arkivio offer?

Arkivio offers a suite of enterprise storage management software solutions for automating the management of data and information over its lifecycle.

• ARKIVIO® auto-xplor provides agent-less discovery and data collection for one-time storage assessments of customers’ existing storage environment.
• ARKIVIO® auto-view provides in-depth monitoring, reporting, and classification of data and storage resources across heterogeneous file systems and DAS/NAS/SAN environments. (also does not require installation of server agents)
• ARKIVIO® auto-stor integrates discovery and classification with policy-based migration and movement of data in one comprehensive ILM solution.

What storage solutions does ARKIVIO® auto-stor provide?

By automating discovery, classification, and management of data over its lifecycle, ARKIVIO® auto-stor drives specific solutions for regulatory compliance, storage consolidation, disaster recovery optimization, data retention management, and capacity management of a tiered-storage infrastructure.

How does ARKIVIO® auto-stor decrease Total Cost of Ownership?

ARKIVIO® auto-stor reduces TCO by automating tiered-storage implementation and optimizing utilization of existing resources. Customers benefit from increased utilization of low-cost storage tiers (i.e. ATA disk-based RAID). Additionally, ARKIVIO® auto-stor improves storage administration efficiency by automating manual tasks with policy-based administration, allowing IT administrators to focus on more strategic storage management issues.

Can I move my data to secondary storage without affecting the end user access to the data?

Yes. ARKIVIO® auto-stor allows customers to define and implement data migration policies which are seamless to end users and applications. Access to data does not change.

Will ARKIVIO® auto-stor work with my backup software?

Yes. ARKIVIO® auto-stor has been qualified to work with enterprise backup software applications from vendors such as Veritas, Legato, and Computer Associates to ensure smooth integration with an organization’s existing backup processes.

Will ARKIVIO® auto-stor work with my anti-virus software?

Yes. ARKIVIO® auto-stor also has been qualified with major anti-virus software including McAfee, Norton/Symantec, Computer Associates and TrendMicro.

How does ARKIVIO® auto-stor compare to Storage Resource Management (SRM) technologies?

Similar to SRM technologies, ARKIVIO® auto-stor offers data collection, usage monitoring, and reporting, but unlike most SRM products ARKIVIO® auto-stor does not require installation of server agents. Additionally, while most SRM products stop at monitoring and reporting, ARKIVIO® auto-stor automates data management actions based on administrator-defined policies.

How is ARKIVIO® auto-stor different from Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) technologies?

HSM has not been widely adopted in the storage industry because of its increased complexity in large enterprise environments, since IT administrators must manually configure each dedicated HSM server as a pre-defined source and destination device and migration rules can not be shared between multiple HSM servers. ARKIVIO® auto-stor does utilize some aspects of HSM, such as tag or link migration to minimize impact to users and applications. However, ARKIVIO® auto-stor is significantly more comprehensive than legacy HSM products. For instance, ARKIVIO® auto-stor integrates policy automation with data storage discovery and monitoring to ensure data management actions are driven from real-time information about data and storage utilization. Additionally, ARKIVIO® auto-stor offers a more global approach to classification and grouping of data and storage resources and enables IT administrators to easily create and deploy management policies across multiple systems or within large enterprise environments.

What directory services does ARKIVIO® auto-stor support?

ARKIVIO® auto-stor currently supports Active Directory and OpenLDAP.

What network protocols does ARKIVIO® auto-stor support?

ARKIVIO® auto-stor currently supports TCP/IP for network transport, CIFS and NFS for file access and transfer.

How is reporting implemented in ARKIVIO® auto-stor?

The ARKIVIO® auto-stor software allows you to run either pre-defined or customized reports on areas such as total capacity (available and used) by servers, directories, and volumes; space consumption by top N files and directories, file age distribution and usage patterns, stale file analysis, and more.

What storage management solutions does ARKIVIO® auto-stor address for the administrator?

The ARKIVIO® auto-stor software enables administrators to optimize capacity utilization, consolidate distributed server/storage environments, achieve regulatory compliance, reduce backup and recovery windows, and automate tiered-storage implementations to name a few.

What operating system platforms does ARKIVIO® auto-stor support?

ARKIVIO® auto-stor supports multiple operating systems. The central server software runs on Windows® 2000 Server and can manage resources under the following operating environments with CIFS or NFS:

• Windows® 2003, Windows® 2000,
• Windows NT® 4.0
• Sun Solaris 2.6, 2.7, 8, 9, 10
• HP-UX® 11, 11i
• IBM-AIX® 4.3.3, 5.x
• Red Hat®Linux
• SGI® IRIX®
• Netware 4.x, 5.x, 6
• Mac OS X
• NetApp® Storage Appliances
• EMC® Celerra®, Centera
• NAS devices

Contact our sales department for more information.