El Fresko unveils unique disk-based archiving and compliance solution 24 January, 2010 By Mark Cox

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El Fresko was created last year when K-Par Archiving Software, which had been making archiving and storage management software solutions since 1988, and was particularly strong in the optical archiving market, merged with reseller INSTAR Corporation. Most of the Calgary-based company's market is in the United States, but in addition to Canada they also have some European customers, particularly in the U.K. Their sweet spot is in the SME space and departmental-level applications.

"The K-Par name was kind of pigeonholing as archiving software, said Mark Fowlie, El Fresko's CEO, "Our channel partners have been pushing us to support magnetic media. Our old market was declining. We need to get as close to WORM (write-once, read-many) on magnetic media as we possibly could because our customers were demanding that."

Enter the company's MagnaStor solution, which is engineered to overcome the limitations of magnetic storage and attain the level of reliability needed for long-term data preservation, while at the same time taking advantage of its' price and performance advantages. It offers the fundamental benefits of WORM operation on magnetic media, preventing operations from overwriting previously written physical sectors on the disk, and retains the data on the MagnaStor drive indefinitely.

MagnaStor's embedded policy-based journaling engine ensures that a company's information policies are strictly applied to data. Approved operations -- such as creating a file or directory, writing to or renaming a file, and file retention/destruction operations -- are permanently recorded in the archive. Each event creates a subsequent entry that is never overwritten or deleted. Digital fingerprints are applied to all file system contents, including the solution's built-in journal, and are used to validate the entire system's integrity and authenticity at all times.

The result is a self-checking, tamper-resistant record of the entire file system history which provides a reliable, easy-to-use file system for compliance archiving. Any file at any point in time can be retrieved for audit, recovery or review purposes by simply playing back journal entries to the desired timeframe to show the full chain of custody and present data in its original state. This unique solution binds the historical journal record, all file system structures and user data in an unbroken chronological journal for each file. This is particularly valuable in support of e-Discovery and litigation processes because companies can produce clear audit reports that are derived directly from the file system journal record. As a result, both auditors and non-IT personnel are able to demonstrate the entire chain of custody for any file and verify its authenticity.

"MagnaStor will enhance any compliance solution" and can easily bolt onto them, Fowlie said. "We see it as a robust enabling technology which we can take to market in different solution sets -- medical image, document management -- anyone who has to collect multimedia. It focuses on unstructured data, not databases."

Fowlie also sees MagnaStor complementing their original product line, not making it obsolete.

"We still are an optical vendor," he said. "We are just augmenting it with a more robust solution for our customers. The optical solution now becomes a backup."

"We are marketing it primarily as compliance, because of the provability of authenticity. But it can also be used as data storage, for moving stuff off online disk, leveraging older hardware. Nothing else has the provability for authenticity as this though."

El Fresko's strategy to get MagnaStor to market is to leverage both their install base and their channel.

"We are going back to our install base with this because our install base knows we will walk though walls for them," Fowlie said.

"With the channel, we want to get them excited, but we also don't want to wait for them. We know they need to see provability. We know there is a hurdle any 1.0 release has to overcome. We think this can add something to their offering that will allow them to differentiate themselves from their competitors."

To this end, they are also accelerating their partner program,

"We are looking to sign new partners in a matrix -- around a geography, domain and vertical combination," Fowlie said. "We want a focused number of partners rather than a shotgun approach."