Permanent storage for digital content provider PowerFile Tuesday announced the introduction of its Active Archive Appliance (A3). The company claims the A3 utilizes a new approach to keeping fixed content data, such as documents, images, and media files, accessible on the network and active. This approach does not require that data be banishing off to tape to be stored for years.
   
The A3 presents itself to the network as a standard network volume and commits permanent data to a virtualized massive array of DVD optical media. The system leaves a copy of frequently accessed data in primary cache for fast retrieval. By pooling the DVD subsystem storage, the A3 creates highly reliable volumes of storage up to 30.6 terabytes. By using a standard DVD underpinning, the system protects important archived information from accidental erasure, unauthorized modification, data corruption, or viruses for 50 years or more. Since the system was designed and tuned for long-term online archive, power usage is 5 percent of that of typical spinning disk.