StrongBox Data Solutions, the leading provider of autonomous data management and archive solutions, announced today the release of the second generation StrongLink data and storage resource management software, which introduces dramatic scale-out performance improvements as well as an optional LTFS feature that adds native support for tape libraries from any vendor. These new capabilities enable IT managers to seamlessly manage their data by policy in a cross-platform global namespace that can include flash, disk, tape, and cloud storage from any vendor. 

StrongLink is a vendor-neutral software solution designed to help IT managers and data stewards leverage metadata-derived intelligence about their files and storage resources to automate policy-based data management actions. StrongLink bridges multi-vendor storage silos to aggregate metadata from file systems as well as user-defined custom metadata about the files, providing a data-centric approach based upon business priorities to automate file actions across storage resources in a global namespace. This also means that users can access files on any storage type via standard file protocols, whether the underlying storage supports that protocol or not.

"This new second generation StrongLink platform plus the LTFS capability brings an unprecedented level of scale, control, and choice to customers to manage their data," said Floyd Christofferson, CEO of StrongBox Data Solutions. "It is designed to let data intelligence automatically drive storage resource allocation and policies, regardless of which storage platform they have today, or may wish to add tomorrow."

With the introduction of the LTFS feature to the second generation StrongLink platform, support for tape has been brought to a new level of scalability. By policy, the system can automatically offload inactive data from primary storage tiers without disrupting user access, to provide air-gap replication with vaulted copies to help guard against ransomware, or to automatically create a true active archive on the lowest cost storage either on premises or in the cloud.

Unlike other systems, StrongLink is built with "Any-to-Any" data movement capabilities, without relying on stubs, symlinks, agents or other proprietary hooks and changes to file systems. This means that StrongLink can move data by policy directly from any storage tier or type to any other, including tape, without the need of an additional intermediary disk cache. For multi-petabyte data environments, this translates to significant savings on infrastructure costs, power usage, and data center real estate. 

StrongLink and the new LTFS feature are designed for scale-out performance, with a self-healing multi-node architecture that can start as small as a single node, and grow without limitation to support extreme file counts, data volumes, and I/O requirements. And unlike other systems StrongLink is not priced by capacity of data under management. Costs do not increase over time, even though customers' data volumes inevitably will.

By bridging different storage silos in a multi-protocol global namespace, StrongLink with the new LTFS capability gives customers complete control of both their data and their storage, to remove complexity, reduce storage costs, and enforce global data protection.