A little bit of archiving news came out earlier this month, and even though I missed it then, it still looks intriguing enough to post now.

It seems that Permabit Technology, which makes a scalable archiving platform, has teamed up with ZL Technologies, a specialist in e-mail archiving. Together, the companies say they have devised an end-to-end grid architecture dedicated to long-term data retention.

The system provides e-discovery capabilities for more than 1,000 file types, combining file system virtualization, deduplication, Boolean search and other features. It also has self-healing capabilities at the storage, file index and primary server levels and provides dynamic adjustment of server and storage resources to suit individual archiving tasks.

The two key technologies at work here are Permabit’s highly scalable disk-based archiving platform and ZL’s grid-based file system architecture that allows Permabit to present directly to any node regardless of scale. Besides the advanced functionality, the design offers a lower TCO than traditional archiving platforms.

The primary markets are heavily regulated industries like legal, financial and health care that require data storage and retrieval across petabyte-scale, multi-billion volume archives.