I’ve always been a fan of Tony Stark and Iron Man because this super hero was created through the use of innovative technology. As a movie heavily laden with CGI, it then becomes even more interesting to learn about the technology that was used for content management while creating the movie and how it can be used for archiving and eDiscovery as well.
As luck would hvae it, Iron Man 2 is opening this weekend and I have been invited to attend a special screening by the folks at Isilon where they will also discuss the back-end production of the movie and how Isilon’s technology was used to unify, manage, and access the movie’s content. More than the movie itself, I’m curious to see how Isilon’s clustered storage system and OneFS file system provided advantages for these specific requirements, and if there are any parallels to our use of storage systems for unstrucutred content archiving and eDiscovery. At ZL Technologies, we partner with many storage providers but I’ve always had a special interest in Isilon since their clustered storage solution was used for our Unified Archive 6.0 scalability tests. In that system, we archived over 1 million email messages per hour across a grid of low-end, commodity Pentium 4 servers backed by an Isilon IQ 3000i storage cluster with InfiniBand.
I looked at a few other technology companies marketing Iron Man 2 and found that a number of them provide high-end, scalable solutions, ones that our customers oftne deploy with the largest ZL Unified Archive deployments:
- Oracle: ZL Unified Archive runs on Oracle Database and is compatible with both Oracle RAC and DataGuard. I’ve architected solutions using Oracle and gave a presentation at least year’s Oracle OpenWorld. Oracle’s scalability allows our largest customers to archive billions of emails in a single Oracle-backed deployment.
- VMware: Virtualization allows ZL Unified Archive to scale easily from 1 to 100s of servers. Going beyond simple virtualization benefits, our Grid architecture allows these servers to be deployed into a true elastic computing private cloud by using the same template and configuration across servers since each ZL server and run any or all tasks. Tasks or roles can be assigned to specific servers by clustering servers by role. VMware’s virtualization supports production scaling at some of our largest customer deployments.
- Isilon: Isilon’s clustered storage provides an ideal back end ZL Unified Archive’s private cloud architecture. While VMware provides the infrastructure for the elastic compute cloud, Isilon’s clustered file system provides an idea platform partner for Unified Archive’s Virtual File System, abstracting the storage layer from each of the individual UA servers.
Given the strong parters supporting Iron Man 2, it begs the question, what email archive and pan-Enterprise eDiscovery product would Tony Stark choose? The natural answer is ZL Unified Archive
- ZL Technologies: With ZL Unified Archive’s cloud-based, grid architecture, Unified Archive has been scaled to the largest corporate enterprises in the world. The combination of Unified Archive’s content management and eDiscovery software with strong technology foundations from Oracle, VMWare and Isilon provide one of the most scalable, high performance, and low TCO enterprise archiving solutions today. As a technology and a business person, the combined solution is very interesting from both a systems architecture and TCO perspectives.
So enjoy Iron Man 2, think about the scalable technology used to power the movie, and how that same technology can be combined with ZL Unified Archive to drive an email archiving and eDiscovery solution for Tony Stark and Stark Enterprises!
