QStar Technologies
QStar Technologies is a software company based in the United States. Initially designed to support large format optical drives and libraries on the SunOS platform, the company produces an array of software and hardware for storage management and archiving software on 19 different operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS.
History
The company was founded in 1987 in Bethesda, Maryland by Brian Swafford. Its European headquarters was established in Milan, Italy in 1994. The company's corporate headquarters is located in Navarre, Florida, and it is represented abroad through a network of distributors and resellers.
Software and hardware
QStar develops archive and data management software for storage devices. It supports several archive technologies (Tape, Optical, RDX, RAID, Object Storage and Cloud) from several archive vendors. Options include proprietary and industry-standard file systems, such as LTFS Linear Tape File System and UDF Universal Disk Format
QStar software supports the "3-2-1 Archiving and Data Protection Best Practice",[1] which mandates three copies of data are stored in the archive, consisting of a performance copy, a secure copy and a disaster recovery copy. Ideally this is achieved using a blend of two storage technologies - disk based and removable media. One copy always needs to be off-site at a remote site.
In 2010, QStar helped found the Active Archive Alliance [2] a collaborative industry association to educate end user organizations on new technologies designed to help reliably store and retrieve archived data.
Products
- Archive Manager [3]—Archive software to manage LTO tape and optical (including Blu-ray) storage libraries and other archive technologies
- Archive Replicator [4]—file-based replication for local and remote archive storage providing automatic disaster protection
- Data Director [5]—block-based mirroring of media within one or multiple archive storage libraries
- Simulated Media Library -- Virtual Optical and Tape library software to run on RAID hardware
- Network Migrator [6]—Policy-based tiered storage and data lifecycle management automated tiered storage with data migration
- Master and Axxess -- Tertiary Archive software to manage CD and DVD storage libraries
- SntrySTR – Archive Storage Appliance with pre-installed QStar software