Company History

At Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc., our primary focus is professional data archiving. Products are designed by industry veterans specifically for professional data archiving applications. Alliance’s product evolution is based upon a long history of optical technology evolving from the early 1980’s. Technology forerunners are the aristocracy of optical development including: Control Data Corp, OSI, Laser Magnetic Storage, Inc., Philips LMS, and more.

As the predecessor companies were merged and acquired throughout the years, employees have filtered through and followed the technology as it has progressed until finally resting with Alliance. Collectively, Alliance employees maintain a vast knowledge of the industry and product lines. Hence, the legacy of science and technology behind optical data archiving continues with the added excitement of new advancements and capabilities.

Keeping abreast of technology, Alliance continues the legacy with groundbreaking new products and features that ultimately result in newer and more efficient methods of archiving data, improved flexibility, and a greater level of customer satisfaction.

History

1986
Control Data Corp. and OSI combine to form Laser Magnetics Storage, Inc. (LMSI), a company focused on optical technology development. The LMS technology included optical media and Laser Drives using the ablative method of reading and writing to optical media. The company continued to develop LD technology starting with the LD1200 2GB media and drives. The next generation of LD technology, the LD4000, is developed between 1987 and 1990 with a capacity of 5.6GB.

1987
Plasmon, established in 1987 with headquarters based in UK, began producing optical drives and media for data storage then later introduced optical jukeboxes in the late 1980’s and beyond using Panasonic libraries and Sony’s Magneto Optical (MO) Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) drives and media.

1990
Philips acquires Laser Magnetic Storage, Inc, becoming Philips LMS, located in Colorado Springs. Philips continued to develop the LD product line releasing the LD6000 with a capacity of 12GB and then the LD8000 with a capacity of 30GB. The LD series drives and media were integrated into FileNET OSAR and Cygnet data storage libraries as well as standalone applications.

1992
Plasmon offers Panasonic jukeboxes rebranded as Reflections based on Magneto Optical (MO) technology with a capacity of 940MB to 1.4GB.

1994
Plasmon acquires manufacturing company IDE located in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, that was producing data storage libraries. The manufacturing operation then becomes Plasmon IDE. The M Series libraries were released with capacities ranging from 52GB to 4.5TB in 1999. The D Series libraries with CD and DVD media with capacities ranging from 564GB to 20.4TB

1999
Plasmon acquires Colorado Springs-based Philips LMS, with that location now becoming Plasmon LMS. That same year in 1999, Plasmon released the first generation of phase change technology, the LD8000, with a 30GB capacity.

2000
By 2000, Plasmon products included the M Series with MO media at 9.1GB and the G Series direct attached library with the same media. The SCSI attached G Series libraries connected directly to a server and required third-party application software in order to interface with the library. Plasmon worked with many world class integrators and software vendors in order to ensure that the libraries were adaptable to any industry and application; consequently, the G Series achieved great popularity.

2002
Plasmon IDE was moved from Minnesota to Colorado Springs. The first generation of Ultra Density Optical (UDO) 30GB media and drives were introduced and referred to as UDO1. The G Series libraries were adapted to utilize MO media and drives, UDO1 media and drives, or both.

2003
Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc. (ASTI) was established in Colorado Springs, by Chris Carr, a previous Philips employee with many years of industry experience. The company became a value added reseller (VAR) for Plasmon and Hewlett Packard storage libraries while providing installation and maintenance support to its International customer base.

2005
New product developments by Plasmon include the UDO Archive Appliance (AA) Network Attached Storage (NAS) library. The new all-in-one appliance includes a Storage Management System (server) with RAID, and an operational software application combined with a UDO library. The initial Archive Appliance was released in 2007 with UDO1 media.

2007
Plasmon advances UDO with the release of UDO2 60GB drives and media. The Archive Appliance is further developed to include UDO2 drives and media having the backwards compatibility of reading UDO1 media in UDO2 drives. The G Series libraries have even greater backwards compatibility with mixed drive and media capability.

2008
By early 2008, Plasmon UK announced that it has filed the UK’s version of bankruptcy. Plasmon LMS in the US seeks funding from a private equity group, and restructures the operation in order to thwart financial difficulties. The company’s manufacturing operations and primary assets were located in Colorado Springs. However, by the end of 2008 the private equity group fell through with their investment forcing the company into receivership.

2009
Having nurtured a long- standing relationship with Plasmon and an in-depth knowledge of the product line, Alliance boldly steps forward and purchases the assets of Plasmon. Alliance’s intention is to continue development of the product line and provide maintenance and service support for Plasmon customers. Alliance recruits many of the local employees and other company professionals in order to retain the intellectual knowledge base and experience, many of whom have a vast amount of legacy industry experience having come from the aforementioned companies merged and acquired along the way. Key support areas for recruitment include manufacturing, engineering, key management and inside and outside sales positions.

2012
Alliance successfully fulfills its intentions and continues to develop the Plasmon product line with the 2012 release of the Archive Appliance Elite, a high-performance version of the Archive Appliance, while also introducing scalability options for the entry and midsized libraries.

2014
Alliance expands into a new headquarters in Colorado Springs with extended manufacturing capacity. Global operations continue with maintenance services and support for current product and legacy product lines. Further software developments have resulted in new software capabilities and features including Replication, Encryption, and Cloud Integrated Storage (CiS).

2015 and Beyond

Developments are underway for a new blue ray optical product line that stands on the shoulders of many prior generations of drive, media and library products augmented by new features that provide customers with entirely new options for data archiving.

Testimonials

This is what customers are saying about Alliance Storage Technologies, Inc.

Sangamon County Circuit Clerk’s Office
The Sangamon County Circuit Clerk’s Office is charged with maintaining the official records of all cases filed and/or adjudicated in the Seventh Judicial Circuit. It is located in the county seat, Springfield, IL, the state capitol. As the administrative arm of the court system, it handles all requests for court records from its constituents – the general public and members of the judicial system. “Our major issue was time lost chasing documents. With the implementation of the archive solution, retrieval times went from days to seconds” said Tony Libri, the Sangamon County Circuit Clerk. Click to download the case study.

Ordnance Survey 
Charged with maintaining maps of every kind, Great Britain’s Ordnance Survey takes millions of digital geographical images during the flying season that are kept indefinitely, in order to ensure that the British landscape is accurately reflected. Faced with an unending accumulation of large digital files that would quickly surpass the backup capabilities of the SAN and capacity of its storage infrastructure, they knew that a long-term, resilient archiving solution was needed. Working with a systems integrator, Ordnance Survey was able to implement a digital content archiving solution consisting of 3rd party archive software paired with ASTI’s Archive Storage platform thus, enabling them to proactively control their tier-one storage and management costs while reducing backup windows.

“The combined solution… will save Ordnance Survey almost £500,000 in storage costs. The project will break even in four years, with an investment return rate of 13.5%, a figure that is well above the government minimum of 5% and our own benchmark of 7%.” – Dave Lipsey, Information Systems Infrastructure Manager. Ordinance Survey – Read the case study

ImpreMedia 
ImpreMedia staff had always stored the news photographs, images and text they created in the form of film, slides or paper at storage facilities maintained by the organization. In recent years this was managed by a database that documented inventory and usage. Image recovery and access through this process was slow and expensive, but necessary to maintain a long-term archive of valuable image assets. By implementing a content management archive system consisting of 3rd party content management software integrated with ASTI’s Archive Storage platform, ImpreMedia was able to implement a highly cost effective long-term digital archive solution, providing a recovery and compliance solution that met its operational requirements. “We started archiving on disk-based RAID, however we found that UDO offered the key components of longevity, access and affordability needed for a project of this type.” – Bob Mason, Chief Technology Officer, ImpreMedia. Read the case study

Phoenix CSI 
With the Phoenix CSI unit’s movement to digital photography, it was crucial to find a comprehensive archival storage solution that would ensure the integrity of each and every CSI photograph. In addition, record-retention laws regarding evidence in the state of Arizona often require photographs to be held for decades or indefinitely. Phoenix CSI chose a Plasmon® 638 G-Series™ archive library, with a  Read the case studynearline capacity of 38TB’s, to ensure the authenticity of their chain of evidence. Plasmon’s UDO™ (Ultra Density Optical) media format satisfied the department’s need for a WORM technology, as well as providing it with a cost-effective solution that delivers safe, long-term storage for highly sensitive images. “As a government agency, finding the most effective technology solutions with most reasonable price points is always important…it was crucial that we found a comprehensive archival storage solution that would ensure the integrity of each and every CSI photograph, so that the detectives and attorneys serving the city would be better equipped to do their jobs effectively.” – Lori Rhyons, Computer Services Bureau Administrator. Read the case study 

Customer Experiences

New York – based brokerage firm
“With this combination of hardware and software, we’ve boosted our data’s accessibility, which was important for complying with the SEC rules... By incorporating a feature that provides real-time data replication to a disaster-recovery site, the solution provides us with a way to implement our disaster-recovery plan.” – IT Manager, New York – based Brokerage Firm. Read the case study

Cabell Huntington Hospital
“The UDO Archive Appliance was the optimal solution that met all requirements – HIPAA compliance, security, fast access, longevity, and cost.” – Sanjay Shah, Vice President and CIO, Cabell Huntington Hospital. Read the case study

Hooper Holmes, Inc., a leading provider of risk assessment services for the insurance industry
“When you consider that we receive nearly 30,000 emails on a daily basis, and regulations mandate that every email we send and receive be kept for up to three years, there was no question that we needed a long-term, easily accessible archive solution. Alliance Storage Technologies’ archival solution has provided us with an easy way to protect our assets while ensuring we are in compliance with industry regulations.” – Art Cooper, System Administrator, Hooper Holmes. 

AGFA Healthcare
“Ensuring that we could provide a PACS archive solution that helps customers meet HIPAA compliance at a reasonable cost was a critical requirement. This was guaranteed with the performance, longevity, and authenticity of the UDO Archive Appliance.” ¬– Lenny Reznik, Director Enterprise Imaging and Information, Agfa Healthcare. 

Citistreet
”We were accumulating large amounts of data which required on-line storage in our production systems. The majority of this data was accessed very infrequently, if at all, but was being kept due to business needs...This on-line data was increasing the capacity needs of the disk subsystems. In addition to disk space, this data was being backed up every week during full system backups. This caused the backup window to increase to the point of being unusable, and would require large capital outlays for additional hardware and backup media. As a result, a near-line archiving solution was required.” - Jeff Machols – Systems Integration Manager Read the case study

Loyens & Loeff
“The Plasmon UDO Archive Appliance matched our business and technical email archive requirements. We calculated that installing a Plasmon archive could save us more than 280,000 Euros over the next five years when compared to our current EMC storage. This saving is achieved through lower purchase and operating costs and since the Archive Appliance uses very stable UDO media it also eliminates the need for archive backup. This saves us money, but also reduces our backup window and IT resource.” Kees Sprangers, Sr. Systems Engineer. Read the case study

Security Bank of Kansas City
With a movement to RAID storage for storing financial data, Security Bank needed to be assured that data would be retained indefinitely for regulatory purposes. “UDO gives me the confidence that the documents will be there even if there is something wrong with the data stored on RAID” said Dean Foster, VP of Data Processing. Read the case study 

Tapioli Bank
As a new business division of Finland’s Tapiola Group, Tapiola Bank had very specific requirements for the archival storage of accounting and transaction records. Its archive strategy needed to comply with banking regulations while meeting internal operational and budget considerations. Read the case study

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
”With the addition of the initial UDO AA638, we immediately improved visibility into our business information assets and easily met our service level agreements and best practices for archiving our critical data…I chose the Plasmon UDO solution because its capacity, scalability, reliability, and price were all in-sync with my roadmap for our storage practice.” - Peter Kijewskp, Technology Solution Manager, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Read the case study

Bartron Medical Imaging
“Because we wanted a solution that was easily scalable but also had true performance, we realized that Plasmon UDO technology was the only choice… Plasmon stood out as the clear leader.” – Fitz Walker, CEO, Bartron Medical Imaging. Read the case study

Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care
“We had to determine what information was retrievable among the absolute chaos of the first week after Katrina…We were able to recover all of the patient images off the Plasmon libraries…We are now primarily using the Plasmon’s UDO Archive Appliance for its long-term recoverability.” – Kenneth Allen, Health Systems Specialist, South Central Health Care. Click to view the case study

Medizinische Hochschule – Hannover, Germany –
“The UDO Archive Appliance has proven itself as a very reliable solution and we are confident that UDO provides the best possible media technology for archiving our patient’s images.” – Stefan Bartels, Project Manager, Medizinische Hochschule. Read the case study

Amicas, Inc.  
“Plasmon’s UDO Library provides AMICAS with a stable, cost-effective solution with the capability to store large amounts of data on a single piece of removable media.” – Catherine Donohue, AMICAS. Read the case study

National Library of Whales
The National Library of Wales (NLW) is one of the world's great libraries, holding the world's largest collection of works about Wales and other Celtic nations. As a government archive, it has a legal mandate to preserve records and facilitate their availability for the public, retaining records indefinitely. "The Plasmon archive platform provides NLW with extended retention periods that cannot be matched by other storage technologies currently available. UDO is the only storage media that offers us an incorruptible, long-term storage archive," said Owain Pritchard, Digitization System Administrator at NLW. Read the case study

The Coal Authority
The Coal Authority of Britain, established in 1994, has statutory responsibilities related to licensing of coal mining operations in Britain, not directly associated to licensed coalmine operators. The Authority is required to provide public access to information regarding past and present coal mining operations going back to the Coal Mining Act of 1872. To accomplish this and meet government mandates, a Plasmon digital archive solution consisting of UDO Optical Libraries was installed, along with QSTAR archiving software, to store all artifacts (mining maps, plans, historic photos, and documents) from the United Kingdom dating back to 1872) as mandated by Parliament for public access. Read the case study

Dallas Morning News
The Dallas Morning News, one of the country’s oldest and most distinguished newspapers, began publishing on October 1, 1885 and has been awarded six Pulitzer Prizes. Evolving digital technologies required a new strategy for long-term content archiving, asset management, and quick access to image content for ongoing usage. With the increase in storage requirements created by the generation of two million images and related content, a long-term, resilient archiving solution was required. With stringent requirements for longevity, fast access, and low total cost of ownership, the Morning News evaluated many technologies including disk-based RAID, tape and optical storage. Plasmon’s UDO based optical archive solutions were selected. Bob Mason, the Director of Publishing Systems, said “We looked at several solutions but nothing offered the performance and growth rate available with UDO.” Read the case study

National Law Enforcement Agency
As a premier and world renowned national law enforcement agency, constant efforts are undertaken to ensure the efficient management of case related evidence for use in ongoing investigations and criminal proceedings. Faced with securely tracking and managing an overwhelming amount of digital content, an archive solution was required which would archive case evidence on a secure, compliant, cost-effective archive system that met the judicial chain of evidence mandates. It was crucial that surveillance video associated with cases (evidence and court room proceedings) as well as in-car police video could be retained, along with all other associated digital content. ASTI’s archive solutions were selected due to the cost-effective, secure, hardware based WORM archive solution provided, which ensured meeting federal mandates, authenticity and chain of custody requirements.

ASTI Archive Appliance libraries were selected to house the surveillance related video, while ASTI Direct Attach Libraries where integrated with the agencies case management application. After several years of operations, nearly a petabyte of digital video storage and case related digital content has been archived.