Created in 2002, Active Circle develops and markets an innovative software-based solution that addresses the need for storing, preserving, and managing large volumes of digital content. The Active Circle software has been designed for organizations that manage video content, images, scientific and technical data, or user content to help them better control the lifecycle of their data while at the same time keeping down the costs of storage ownership and administration.

Active Circle Product Overview

Active Circle is a software platform designed to store, protect, and manage large and rapidly growing volumes of digital content. The Active Circle software platform aggregates heterogeneous devices into a single and scalable pool of storage. It natively delivers a comprehensive set of services for storage management, data protection and data lifecycle management.

Active Circle has been designed for organizations that manage large volumes of data – video content, images, scientific and technical data – to help them better control the lifecycle of their data while at the same time keeping down the costs of storage ownership and administration.

Hardware-Independent Storage

The Active Circle platform aggregates standard servers and storage devices into an extendable and secure environment. Because it can be installed on standard x86 servers and supports any disk or tape storage system, Active Circle is modular and can be easily extended with the addition of storage space or servers. Your system can therefore evolve independently of storage technologies.

Built-in Services for Data Protection

The Active Circle system has built-in mechanisms for data protection, high availability, and business continuity planning. Data protection is assured by file versioning, which allows users to retrieve previous versions in the event of an error. High availability is delivered by the Virtual File Server cluster: if one node fails, another automatically takes its place. Finally, business continuity is ensured through the replication of data over multiple remote sites.

Data Lifecycle Management

Active Circle automatically manages data according to rules defined by the system administrator. Depending on the options employed, Active Circle will store your digital content on the appropriate media according to your needs in terms of performance and capacity. You can store your most recent and most frequently accessed data on fast disks close to your users. Less urgent information can be placed on cheaper high-capacity disks. Lastly, tapes can be used for long-term, low-cost storage.

Storage Supervision

The Active Circle Administration Tool provides you with a single utility for supervising your storage network. The administrator can oversee the data volumes, available storage capacity, and rates of growth through the graphical interface and then allocate resources as required.

Main Features

• Hardware-independent software platform running on standard x86 servers.
• Data storage on disk or tape libraries.
• Data access through standard network protocols – NFS, CIFS, and FTP – or through the API.
• Optimization through the use of hierarchical storage and data lifecycle management.
• Data protection and high availability provided by versioning, replication, and clustering.
• Multi-site data sharing.

Deploy The Active Circle Storage Platform Adapted To Your Needs:

• Active Circle Archive Edition: for long-term storage of large data volumes, featuring policy-driven tiered storage management on disk and tape libraries. Archive Edition is used by organizations faced with the challenge of storing, protecting and sharing large and growing volumes of digital archives.
• Active Circle Enterprise Edition: to manage the entire file service infrastructure, from primary to secondary storage. Enterprise Edition is the combination of File Server Edition and Archive Edition, plus the ability to distribute and share storage across multiple sites. Distributed organizations and  Cloud Storage providers are using Active Circle Enterprise Edition as a core component of their storage infrastructure.