SAND Technology Introduces Support for the XAM Standard
Extensible Metadata Enables More Flexible Deployment of Mixed Storage Media for Massive Amounts of Data
Montreal, Canada – February 2, 2009 – SAND Technology Inc. (OTCBB: SNDTF.OB), an international provider of information management software and best practices, today announced that it has officially introduced support in its SAND/DNA product suite for the eXtensible Access Method (XAM) interface developed by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). SAND/DNA products can now write data to any fixed-content device that supports XAM.
The XAM standard features a framework for extensible metadata associated with stored objects, which supports retention/disposition and electronic discovery (e-discovery) capabilities and facilitates implementation of information life cycle management strategies. SAND/DNA’s XAM support enables enterprises to implement a single basic storage architecture and a single set of data governance policies for both unstructured and structured data, and to achieve better compliance with governance requirements at a lower cost.
For data framework solutions such as SAND/DNA, XAM provides the ability to store large amounts of structured data securely and efficiently to ensure compliance with data governance requirements. The SAND/DNA Access product can use XAM storage providers like EMC Centera as WORM (Write Once Read Many) devices to ensure that stored data is not modifiable. In turn, SAND/DNA Access maintains massive volumes of structured data as content for the XAM storage provider, enabling a complete enterprise solution for data governance and compliance. SAND/DNA Access also brings high-performance query capability for structured data in the XAM storage provider, making it possible to conduct true electronic discovery (e-discovery) on this data. Furthermore, XAM storage providers offer robust integrated business continuity and disaster recovery protection for structured data in SAND/DNA Access.
“We are excited to be able to offer support for the XAM API, and very pleased at the results of our tests of this functionality,” said Richard Grondin, SAND Technology’s vice-president of Research and Development. “Data migration and query performance were both very impressive: using just 4 blade servers, data migration speeds were higher than 400 MB per second, and query speeds were close to 11 million records scanned per second. This shows that the new XAM functionality of SAND/DNA Access is more than up to the task of enabling existing XAM storage provider customers to extend their infrastructure to incorporate data compliance and governance regimes for massive amounts of structured data.”
“SNIA is very enthusiastic about recognizing an increasing number of industry software vendors that are programming to the SNIA XAM V1.0 standard,” said David Martin, Chair of the SNIA XAM Initiative. “SNIA standards along with the SNIA software developer kits are developed so early adopting vendors like SAND can provide the end user community with rich, robust solutions to meet today’s most stringent data management and retention requirements. With XAM’s multiple vendor storage platform support, end users will realize long term investment protection with industry choice.”