StrongLink, a universal data tiering solution

StrongBox Data Solutions (www.strongboxdata.com), an alternative player for data management, has presented an interesting session during the last IT Press Tour. We had the chance to meet David Cerf, CEO and founder of the company, at the FujiFilm Innovation Hub in Santa Clara.

David Cerf, CEO, promoting actively StrongLink

The company came from Crossroads with a transaction made in April 2016 and historically it sells the StrongBox LTFS NAS Appliance. Strongbox Data Solutions belongs to Partner One Capital. We'll write soon about the NAS archiving solution so let's focus for this post on StrongLink.

Since the beginning, StrongBox has focused on some vertical use cases such M&E, government and public sector, HPC & geospatial, research institutions or medical.

StrongBox has decided to build and design a very comprehensive product able to be the storage and data unificator across independent storage brands, models and product generations playing in that case a horizontal role thanks to the data that serves as the glue between silos and devices. The product fits in 2 categories at the same time, it's about Data Management but also Storage Management, and invite uses to continue with their current environments and devices, build strong data protection policies and reduce costs of the storage infrastructure. StrongLink is defined as a Cognitive Data Management product to optimize cost, data usage and maximize productivity from the same environment.

In term of features, StrongLink offers:

• In-place non-disruptive deployment especially for current storage devices,
• Data classification and indexing,
• Smart versioning of all data and metadata,
• Strong data integrity checks,
• Smart pools to form logical groups of storage managed via just a metadata tag and for ease of management with policies attached to them,
• Data mobility across any devices and locations,
• Data protection extension with additional copies if needed at various locations and units,
• Search and Orchestration for any storage and any data, I still have some doubt about databases integration,
• Unification of Data and Storage management with original access methods maintained such NFS, SMB, S3 or Swift for instance,

StrongLink plays the role of a Data Virtualization layer and offers a a web console to manage globally the environment.

Three architecture models are possible: Star with only 1 StrongLink node deployed out-of-band, Constellation aka cluster of nodes with a minimum of 3 nodes and Galaxy as a mixed of Constellation and/or Star and several of them. StrongLink offers a very flexible console available on tablet, smartphone or any web-based environment.

In term of licensing, 2 models are possible: perpetual or subscription license model based on number of concurrent users.

StrongLink clearly deserves a look and try as it's probably one of the most comprehensive and open solution on the market, they just need to improve visibility and sign more business partners.