The company has announced PoINT Archival Gateway - Unified Object Storage to bridge disk and tape and named this model a Software-Defined Secondary and Archive Storage. I invite the team to pay attention to name a category with the danger to be alone in it and never be chosen by users because they're unable to compare you. We have plenty of examples of that with the perpetual quest to reach a blue ocean instead of realizing that it is already a red one.
The good thing is the data mover engine between these 2 levels within the object storage environment and thus behind the exposed interface. It means admins can create some intelligent policies position the right data at the right place and maintain redundancy. The other interesting feature is the single namespace between these 2 levels masking the data location and of course S3 interface for the outside world. PoINT maintains its advantage to access data directly from tape without local caching. This is optional. The team uses the term JBOD and HDD Object Storage which is not clear, does it mean NAS or block storage, and why support only HDD object storage and not flash-based. My understanding is that it could be NAS or block storage where PoINT generates a file system on it connected and mounted directly. For object storage, again S3 is just an interface. These 2 levels can be configured as a hierarchy with automatic tiering but also at the same level.
This approach is justified by a market demand with already several offerings, we count 9 on the market: Fujifilm, Grau Data, Nodeum, PoINT, QStar, Quantum, Spectra Logic, StrongLink and XenData with of course some similarities and differences. With all the expertise of PoINT we expect a real take-off of this product, congrats to the team.
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