PoINT, a leader often forgotten in data management

PoINT Software & Systems, a reference in data management for unstructured data for almost 3 decades, joined the 45th edition of The IT Press Tour this week in Paris and the press group had the perfect opportunity to learn more about this confidential leader. I qualify PoINT as a leader because they play for a very long time having probably one of the largest expertise in the open system era in the domain. Let's dig a bit in their Tiering and Archiving solutions.

Historically the company was famous for its optical jukebox supporting a large variety to media and the number of licences passed 2,500 units.

The next product is PoINT Storage Manager, called sometimes PSM, dedicated to File Tiering and Archiving showing a HSM philosophy. PSM has more than 200 installations worldwide. It supports a wide variety of storage media and storage systems as source or target and the engine runs on Windows Server OS. It supports generic file servers and also special NAS and also optical libraries in addition of tape, NAS, object and WORM storage. The product works in 2 modes: active and passive mode. In active mode, original files are replaced by special files after migration processes happened, their file size is truncated to zero to indirectly show their status, this move is controlled by a policy. The product offers multiple access methods such the famous stubbing, web links, symbolic links but also web client browser and application integration. One of the beauty of SPM is that reads are pass-through and thus don't require local copy on primary storage. Of course if the file is changed, the new version is stored locally and becomes a potential candidate for a future migration. In that case, the secondary storage may stored multiple versions of the same file. In the passive mode, PSM exposes the PoINT Archive file system and files are accessible via a classic model. To be portable and used in a variety of systems and over a long period of time, the team has chosen a standard format, UDF (Universal Disk Format), to expose archive data. UDF allows a containerization of archive data and managed as a whole.

But clearly the name of the product doesn't reflect what it does, it's too generic as well, it would have been better to name it with something like PoINT File Migration or PoINT Data Tiering.

The other product is called PoINT Archival Gateway to offer a S3 front-end to a tape library and thus move towards a universal approach of the interface. This product was launched 2018 and really anticipated the market as today we see at least 8 others products: Fujifilm, Grau Data, Nodeum, QStar, Quantum, Spectra Logic, StrongLink and XenData for a total of 9 with PoINT. The product demonstrated some high interesting characteristics with 1PB/day move capabilities and volume superior fo 10PBs. The image below summarizes pretty well what the product can offer. IT implements erasure coding on tape libraries more something similar to RAIT but differently from what Quantum has developed. 

And the last is named PoINT Data Replicator and offers a solution to copy files to S3 and even copy S3 data to another S3 destination. S3 could be any entity that respects S3 API, it could be an on-premises object storage or a public cloud service. Thus it could be coupled with the Archival Gateway.

And the company maintains as well so other tools like the File System Analyzer, Jukebox Manager and Publisher for CV/DVD and Blu-ray discs.

Definitely a player that counts in this market segment, a bit too confidential when you see the power of its solutions.