Maintenance Plan Benefits

Key Plan Components

• Factory trained and certified engineers
• Hardware diagnosis and repair – qualified technicians with extensive experience
• Software support with quick analysis and system functionality determination
• Remote support for system diagnosis and repair
• Factory tested and certified Plasmon/Alliance parts
• Local parts stock for timely remedial maintenance
• Proactive system analysis – identify problems before they impact business
• Preventive maintenance
• Proprietary access to Alliance Intellectual Property (IP) facilitates full analysis and resolution of issues
• Direct access to product updates (patches/releases)
  • Firmware and software feature enhancements
  • Easy access to software license renewals
  • 1 hour call back
• Incident management

Maintenance Plans Available

Contact Alliance Sales: 719-593-7900 or submit a Request for Quote.

Service Plan Renewals

Alliance understands that archiving solutions are critical to business operations and that continued maintenance is an important part of the process. Service contracts are a critical aspect of business continuity and Alliance appreciates being selected the service provider of choice.

Our renewal team is standing by to:

• Answer questions about Service Contracts.
• Provide renewal assistance or a multi-year contract quote.
• Discuss enhanced support options.
• Or, update account contact information to ensure the right people receive important communications from the Alliance team.

For more information, please contact our maintenance renewal coordinators for additional contract information: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Professional Services

Optical Media Cleaning, Analysis & Recovery 

(Outside of regularly scheduled maintenance)

Alliance will perform analysis on the suspect media to determine whether the media is defective and if data is recoverable. If data recovery is possible all readable data will be copied from the defective media to a new piece of media.

• Can be performed onsite or at the Alliance facility
• Click here to view the Media Services page

Onsite Library Expansions

Alliance/Plasmon libraries are designed with expansion capabilities that enable companies to meet current and future data archiving requirements. 

There are many benefits to the intrinsic scalability of libraries. Businesses and organizations can expand incrementally as data archiving requirements increase. Scalability minimizes initial impact on IT budgets by purchasing what is needed for initial capacity requirements while maintaining the potential for expansion. It allows IT departments to budget/plan for expansion and accommodate data growth without changing footprint size.

Support services available for expansions:

• Add expansion cabinets to UDO Enterprise libraries
• Add an extension library to an existing NAS installation
• Increase current slot and media capacities

Contact Alliance Sales to learn more about library scalability

Library Upgrades

Upgrades are available for legacy libraries enabling companies to keep existing equipment in production as long as possible, minimizing the need for data migrations. Alliance continues to offer parts, services and upgrades for a variety of legacy libraries still in use.

• Alliance can help support transitions from legacy jukeboxes to new Alliance UDO archive libraries
• Increase current slot and media capacities
• Upgrade to higher capacity drives – both optical (including UDO1 to UDO2) and SATA

Contact Alliance Sales to learn more about library upgrades

Data Migrations

Migrating data can be a time consuming and challenging process. Using Alliance’s professional services, data migrations can be planned with confidence. Alliance’s highly skilled technicians will provide the support and expertise needed to ensure a smooth transition.

Contact Alliance Sales to learn more about migrating data

Media Services

Media Services

Optical Media Cleaning

Optical media is generally worry-free and since its inception, has been the media of choice for long-term archival storage. The media is extremely stable and unlike other archiving mediums, is not susceptible to magnetic interference, heat, humidity, water, EMP or solar flares, hardware failures, pollution, deletion, power surges, warping, active viruses and hackers. Additionally, optical media does not require special handling and can be stored offsite without the need for special environmental conditions.

Media does on occasion require cleaning as it can become contaminated by airborne particles or other elements depending upon environment. That is when Media Cleaning Services are needed. There are many reasons to keep media cleaned on a regular basis as follows:

• Increase media efficiency - Media cleaning is a very important factor of system performance that is often over-looked by customers. This is due to multiple retries of the system hardware which recover many errors and appear transparent to the user. However, this is an essential part of proper system performance, reduction of errors and media efficiency.
• How? A small particle of debris the size of a pen point, can cause many read / write errors, impact drive performance, cause a loss in media capacity, and in some cases cause failure to recover customer data. Debris can migrate to other areas of the media surface as well as to the optical lens of the drive. With proper media maintenance severe problems can be prevented.
• Why? Media surface contamination can be caused by many sources and is largely dependent on the environmental conditions of where the system hardware is located. Printers and scanners are a large contributor to contamination and should not be located in the same room as optical disk drives. A clean computer room with filtered air can greatly extend the time between cleanings.
• Interval - Media cleaning should be performed on a regular basis. To determine the proper interval start with a clean piece of media, note the date and the media serial number, insert media into system, then inspect the media every two weeks for surface contamination. When significant contamination is seen on the media surfaces note the date. The time between the start date and end date is the period in which media cleaning should be scheduled.

Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc. (ASTI) offers professional media cleaning service at your site, or at the ASTI technical lab where media is cleaned by factory trained, experienced media technicians. Media Cleaning is available for all UDO, MO, and 12 inch Optical Data Storage Media.

Click here to download the Optical Media Cleaning brochure. 

Contact ASTI Sales: 719-593-7900 or submit a Request for Quote.