StorLife Compliant Storage

Content Addressed Storage Solutions

StorLife is a software-only Content Addressed Storage (CAS) solution providing the online performance of magnetic disk, scalability, resilience and assured content authenticity. StorLife is a hardware independent lifecycle management solution which manages specific policies regarding content retention, disposal, encryption, and access to meet corporate governance requirements.

Increasing demands for fast and easy retrieval of information, content and documents are challenging organisations to get more out of their storage and archive infrastructure. This is particularly true in financial services, healthcare and other regulated industries where large amounts of fixed content and documents need to be made available across different departments and applications securely.

Fixed Content is information that does not change over time and which must be preserved in its original format such as financial reports, trading contracts and medical records. The value of this fixed content is that it contains critical reference information that must be made available, unchanged, either directly to its owners or via business systems. New legislation for compliance, corporate governance and e-discovery has meant that the growth in volume of corporate content is now accompanied by a requirement for accurate and authentic information.

Working with third party applications or in combination with SoftCo's R8 Business Process Automation Platform, StorLife delivers high performance search and retrieval of critical information and content while at the same time maintaining its security and integrity from a single, authenticated source.

Content Addressed Storage

Content Addressed Storage is a magnetic disk based storage software technology that stores and retrieves information based on its unique content and not its storage location. CAS calculates a unique ‘digital fingerprint’ for every object stored in its system.

This unique ‘digital fingerprint’ is based on the binary content of the object and is generated by an industry standard hashing algorithm.This fingerprint is then stored in the CAS index and is used to reference, locate and access the content. Any information or document retrieval requests must provide the digital fingerprint, from which the system can determine the physical location of the content. The hashing algorithm is then re-run and the result checked against the digital fingerprint - as long as the content has not been changed the information or document will be returned.

Today, businesses must have in place a centrally managed storage and archive infrastructure that relies on compliance based policies so that the right content is stored, in the right format, for the right amount of time at an affordable cost.

The need for Content Addressed Storage cuts across multiple industry sectors where regulations stipulate that information, documents or records must be retained for specific amount of time and must not be altered or removed during their retention period. With more information subject to scrutiny, CAS has become the preferred storage medium for the long-term protection of fixed content to assist organisations meet their legal and business obligations.

Content Addressed Storage Process

With significantly faster retrieval times than traditional optical and tape based archives, CAS provides real time information, document and record access, while at the same time guaranteeing the integrity and authenticity of the content being provided by employing a Write Once Read Many (WORM) technique to emulate the long term retention and protection features of optical disk storage.

StorLife Process

StorLife Overview

Multiple software applications such as financial, medical and information management systems are able to securely archive and retrieve fixed content, documents and records in a single, protected repository.

Using an open standard API, applications can send their associated fixed content to StorLife to be securely stored in an online, compliant archive.

As content is received by the StorLife Server, a digital finger print is calculated using an industry standard hashing algorithm based on the unique binary content of the object or file being stored.

Using Single Instance Storage (SIS) and by comparing the new digital finger print against those already held in the StorLife index, SIS determines if the content is a duplicate. Unique content is stored returning a new digital finger print or content address to the application. In the case of duplicate content, StorLife Server returns the existing content address and updates its index, noting the additional application instance for the same content.

StorLife server archives content to a RAID, SAN, NAS or iSCSI storage infrastructure. The digital fingerprint is returned to the application which will use this content addressed storage reference to retrieve the information, document or record in the future.

To ensure that fixed content is protected over its entire life, StorLife uses a Write Once, Read Many (WORM) technique to ensure that content is held in a non-rewriteable, non-erasable format on magnetic disk devices for the retention period specified by the system.

Download StorLife datasheet in PDF