Steve King, CEO of the Pleasanton, California-based company, said it developed its data restoration capability in 2002 and offers it as a service. He explained that the technology is relevant in compliance scenarios, where the retention period of data is changing. We can take the stuff that held on tape and make it more readily accessible on disk.

In addition to the increased accessibility, he went on, this service reduces the risk of holding data on tape, as well as enabling de-duping.

It also helps when it comes to the deadline for deleting the data, because deletion from backup tapes is something of an issue in its own right, said Glenn Perachio, Zantaz’ European sales director.

Of course, providing data restoration from tape us also a way to feed its main archiving business, King explained, in that we first restore the data, then put it into a repository, with that repository being held on disk and, potentially, replicated to a second site for additional security.

We encourage customers to create the repository with our DigitalSafe technology, which brings with it the ease of searching for specific records, he went on.

Perachio also moved to refute an affirmation by Symantec Corp in a recent interview with Computer Business Review, whereby its senior marketing director Art Gilliland said that the latest version of its Digital Accelerator module can impose legal holds on data, overriding deletion policies within the base Enterprise Vault product, a capability he claimed was not present in products from competitors like Zantaz.

Perachio said the ability to enforce legal hold had already been offered in the Discovery module of Zantaz’s EAS archiving product since before Symantec launched its enhanced DA.

Their enhanced DA module is recognition of Zantaz’ leadership, he argued. They’re playing catchup with our module for EAS, and in any case, they have no equivalent to our Introspect product.

He referred to the far more muscular discovery capabilities of the product Zantaz got when it bought Steelpoint Technologies Inc in 2004, which brought it true litigation support technology.

The Symantec DA module for EV is really no more than pre-culling of data, said Perachio, and as such is essentially a competitor to the Discovery module of EAS, with Introspect in another league and competing with dedicated discovery vendors.