Backup software vendor Atempo, now run out of the U.S. by CEO Neal Ater, formerly of Veritas but maintaining a bit of a French accent, entered the archiving market in February by acquiring Lighthouse Global Technologies. It has since released new versions of both the e-mail and file archiving solutions. Now, at the beginning of what I hope is a major trend, it has added the ability to use Nirvanix cloud storage SDN service as an archive repository for files with storage costs of just two bits per gigabyte a month.Users still set up the ADA (Atempo Digital Archive) server on their premises and use it, along with data collection agents for Windows, Linux, AIX, and OSX, to collect files to archive based on file system metadata. The ADA server can then archive files to the cloud as just another repository. Installation still isn't completely integrated and you'll have to set up the Nirvanix account before installing ADA, but the thought of moving all those files no one's touched in years off to the cloud were Nirvanix will store 2 or 3 copies so I never have to back them up again is just so appealing.

The full text index stays on-premise, so searches are still quick, while retrievals will be dependent on Internet bandwidth available.

Atempo had no comment when I asked about integrating cloud storage into ADAM, its e-mail archiver, or its backup products.

Even so, Atempo is the first company I've found that's effectively integrating cloud storage into an existing data management system. Zmanda and Symantec have added online options to their backup software. Hopefully, more vendors will join the trend and cloud storage will be attractive for mere mortals as well as developers and other propeller-heads like me.