Plasmon Gives Free UDO Media in Upgrade Deal

Published: April 24, 2006

by Dan Burger

Mandatory compliance regulations have a way of sinking their teeth into the soft fleshy areas of an IT budget. Seldom is this a painless experience. In terms of record keeping, companies are faced with decisions on which records they must keep, how they are to be stored (usually on unalterable media), and how long companies must store them (up to 30 years in some cases). All of this costs money. Lots of it.

However, for those companies that are using optical storage (MO, DVD and 12-inch optical discs), Plasmon has introduced an ultra density optical (UDO) migration option that brings much higher capacities combined with the promise of lower total cost of ownership. If that sounds too good to be true, read on. Plasmon's UDO Upgrade Program is designed to take advantage of high-performance UDO by providing the media to assist in the migration of corporate archives. If you work for a North American company, that media comes with no charge. Geographic limitations apply.

Plasmon makes UDO libraries available in multiple configurations, including mixed-media options that include both MO and UDO drives in the same library. According to Plasmon, mixed-media libraries are the easiest and most cost-effective path for MO storage users to migrate to UDO.

Under the UDO Upgrade Program, Plasmon will provide free UDO media to assist in the migration of archives for North American customers from now through September 30. Plasmon UDO libraries are available in multiple configurations, including "mixed-media" options that provide for both MO and UDO drives in the same library. Mixed-media libraries enable the easiest and most cost-effective migration path to UDO for MO storage users.

Nigel Street, CEO of Plasmon, says this program comes at a key time when government regulations and company requirements are increasing their archive-retention period requirements as well as their proof of authenticity requirements. He claims the Plasmon UDO option will deliver higher capacity and faster access times, which can both be put to good use when implementing an information lifecycle management strategy that includes archives for regulatory compliance, and backups for disaster recovery.

Storing huge amounts of data is a difficult challenge presented by most compliance regulations; sorting through the data to find critical information in response to an inquiry is even a bigger challenge.

U.K.-based Plasmon and IBM partnered in 2004 to bring UDO technology to the iSeries. That work was completed in September 2004, with the delivery of a PTF update for i5/OS (see "UDO Storage Now Available for the iSeries").