News Coverage - Network Magazine - Thursday May 13, 2004
Article By Andy Dornan
BlackBall Offers Storage Management For Everyone
By Andy Dornan, Network Magazine
It's a familiar complaint: Thanks to search engines, most people find it easier to find data on a remote Web site
than on an intranet server or even on their own hard drives. Start-up BlackBall thinks it can solve the problem
with BlackMagic, a storage management system that combines search, backup, and versioning capabilities.
Running on a Linux, Solaris, or Windows 2000 server, BlackMagic provides clients with a networked drive that can be
accessed in the same way as any other drive. The difference is that it uses BlackBall's own Rich Media File System
(RMFS®), which indexes a file's entire drive but never overwrites files.
Whenever a user saves a document, the index is updated, but not the actual document itself. Instead, RMFS creates a
delta file, which lists changes made since the file was last saved. When a user loads a document, RMFS reconstitutes
it by adding together all the delta files that have been saved since the document was created.
BlackBall claims that this process adds no noticeable delay, even if a file has been frequently changed and involves
hundreds of deltas. And while saving every change made to every file might seem very demanding in terms of storage
capacity, BlackBall says it can actually save space when used with large files that are frequently saved after minor
changes. Instead of storing many different versions of a PowerPoint presentation, it stores only the differences between them.
RMFS also supports metadata, allowing users to add their own descriptions of files and automatically preserving metadata
such as a file's last access date, which would be lost during a normal move or copy operation. In this respect, RMFS is
similar to WinFS, the SQL-based file system that Microsoft is touting for Longhorn, the release of Windows due at some
point between 2005 and 2009. However, WinFS is unlikely to include versioning capabilities.
The BlackMagic software is priced at $1,995 per server. A $99 personal edition is also available, which implements RMFS
on a Windows XP workstation instead of a server. In July, BlackBall will unveil an Enterprise version that integrates the
two: Files are stored both locally and on the server, and are automatically synchronized to keep track of changes made by
users working offline. The index itself is created on the server, so the client suffers no performance hit, something
particularly attractive to laptop users.
|
