Scalability
An archive must handle the complete life cycle of the data it stores. An archive that supports very long retention periods can accumulate a great deal of data over time. Archive systems must therefore be able to grow smoothly from a few terabytes to several petabytes.
The GridBank™ platform is a heterogeneous grid-based cluster platform and is designed to manage data across hundreds of storage devices in order to meet performance and cost requirements. A single GridBank™ server can manage millions of objects, while a single cluster’s raw storage capacity can scale to hundreds of terabytes. Because it is a fully symmetrical system, it distributes the processing of data, metadata, and index information across a network of identical peers. This distributed processing scheme allows the system to scale linearly as the archive grows in size and has more users.
Upgrading storage capacity is transparent to end-users and requires no reconfiguration. For example, after you add a node server to the cluster, the GridBank™ Platform automatically detects the new node and immediately integrates it into the cluster.
