Hitachi Data Systems confirms Archivas purchase

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has confirmed its intention to acquire online storage management software vendor, Archivas, to strengthen its content services business.

On Monday, the storage hardware vendor revealed plans to buy Archivas in a brief media advisory but the vendor held off providing more colour on the move until Tuesday.

Being able to store data securely for long periods of time and also have quick access to that content is becoming key to all sizes of companies as they have to comply with increasing amounts of regulation. Archivas particularly targets the needs of the finance, health care and oil and gas industries as well as governments.

Archivas aims its software, Archivas Cluster (ArC) at companies that need to store, archive, protect and access digital content such as email, images and audio files. The software isn't tied to a particular vendor's storage hardware and is designed to scale from a small repository to a huge archive containing hundreds of terabytes of data. By storing their data in ArC, users can apply protection and retention policies to the content as well as authenticate it with digital signatures.

In June 2006, the two vendors entered into a worldwide OEM relationship with HDS building its Content Archive Platform (CAP) combination of software and storage systems on technology from Archivas. At the time, HDS stressed the importance it placed around CAP as marking the vendor's entrance into the active archivemarket, a term referring to the ability to retrieve archived content. In the past, vendors tended to create archiving systems focused around storing data, not taking into account the need to access that information.

Archivas provides the software component to power CAP's Hitachi Content Archiver, designed to control, authenticate, preserve and protect data stored in the system.

HDS didn't provide financial details about the agreement.

Founded in May 2003, privately held Archivas has its headquarters in Massachusetts.