Through the acquisition, Crossroads gains Grau’s OEM (original equipment manufacturer) agreement with Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), along with its sales presence in Europe, Crossroads of Austin, Texas said. The acquisition also adds US registered intellectual property, as well as other data storage assets that will help to expand Crossroads’ line of BIA solutions, the company said.
Grau Data Storage, headquartered in Schwäbisch Gmünd, was founded in 1990. The company develops and markets hardware and software systems for HSM and archiving, Grau said. The company’s storage solutions are installed at the facilities of a number of customers, the company said. For its sales operations, Grau has succeeded in acquiring a range of OEM partners and resellers, it said.
Crossroads’ solutions serve the growing needs of data storage, business continuity, disaster recovery, information protection, risk management and BIA markets, the company said. Crossroads’ offerings are designed to help companies store, manage and ensure the security, resiliency and access to critical data, it said. Crossroads’ products are embedded in solutions from companies such as EMC Corp., HP, Quantum Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. Crossroads is a member of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).
Grau is the latest of Crossroads’ three acquisitions since 2004, adding intellectual property that strengthens its BIA product offerings, accelerates innovation, meets customer demand and expands partner opportunities, Crossroads said. Grau technology allows Crossroads to offer scalable, reliable and flexible migration of files as part of corporate/enterprise data consolidation efforts in the area of HSM in the network or within an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) solution, the company said.
Crossroads offers systematic migration of inactive and rarely used data on file servers to NAS (network attached storage) devices through the newly acquired FMA, Crossroads said. Using this agent, storage capacity on active servers can be freed up to ensure a reduction in data backup volume, the company said. This migration is transparent to the user, and inactive data is physically migrated but is still visible to the user, which allows the user to recall their data at anytime, it added.
With the FMA, the inactive data can be migrated to more cost-effective disk systems like CIFS (common internet file system) supported NAS devices, tape media, or into archive systems, Crossroads said. The existing file server structure is untouched, which makes the integration of the backend data storage system unproblematic, it said.
Data protection is also enhanced as the FMA allows for multiple copies of inactive data to be written to different locations, Crossroads said. By generating redundant copies on multiple NAS devices, a fault-tolerant environment is generated, the company said. If one NAS device is down, the content of the data can be automatically restored from another, it said.
The benefits of the FMA include storage consolidation, Crossroads said. In environments where each server in the network backs up its data on separate drives, the FMA pulls the data together at a central point for archiving, the company said. This central point can also serve as a bridge upon the failure of any server, it said.
The FMA is also cluster ready , and the FMA supports Windows file servers in a cluster, which enables seamless archival and retrieval of information in a highly available, high-performance environment, Crossroads said.
The FMA also offers flexible migration policies, the company said. Individual data management policies can be user-generated through a GUI (graphical user interface), command line or API (application program interface), it said. User-defined criteria for migration includes file size, file age, access date and attributes, as well as exclusion of special files, Crossroads added.
Organizations continually look for cost-effective methods that easily integrate into their environments and automate their systems, Crossroads said. The acquisition empowers Crossroads to deliver on a more powerful BIA roadmap, the company said. The new BIA solutions will enable OEM vendors to deliver leading-edge solutions, and end-customers to migrate inactive data from their current environment, in order to create a more efficient backup infrastructure, Crossroads added.
The success of the Grau FMA software in regions outside Europe, especially in the US, has led to an increasing demand for sales support, Grau said. Through the acquisition, Crossroads can now offer this support to OEM and channel partners throughout the world, Grau added.
