PoINT Software & Systems: Data management for a world drowning in cold data

For more than three decades, PoINT Software & Systems has been working on a problem that has only grown more urgent: how to store, protect and preserve the world’s expanding volumes of inactive data.

The company’s Managing Director, Thomas Thalmann, describes the challenge: “We have technical teams with challenges of data growth… data migration… scalability and availability,” he says. But the pressures are no longer only technical. Rising storage costs, unpredictable cloud bills, compliance demands, cyber‑crime and energy consumption are now forcing organisations to rethink how they manage data at scale.

PoINT’s answer is a set of software‑defined tools built around a simple principle: put the right data on the right storage. It is an idea that has existed for years, but the economics of storage, the rise of object storage, and the renewed relevance of tape have made it newly compelling for enterprises and service providers.

PoINT’s roots go back to the mid‑1980s, when Thalmann and his colleagues worked at Philips, which at the time was pioneering CD recording. The team later moved into Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) after Philips’ IT activities were acquired in the early 1990s. When DEC itself underwent major restructuring, the group executed a management buy‑out in 1994 and founded PoINT Software & Systems.

The company’s early work focused on optical archiving. Its PoINT Jukebox Manager, launched in 1997, supported large optical libraries from HP, JVC and others. At its peak, the product had more than 2,500 installations, but the optical market collapsed rapidly in the early 2000s as disk‑based archiving became cheaper and EMC’s Centera system – described at the time as the ‘jukebox killer’ – set a new direction for content‑addressed storage.

Rather than disappear with the optical market, PoINT pivoted. The company recognised that its expertise in long‑term archiving and storage management could be applied to emerging technologies such as object storage, cloud storage and modern tape systems. That pivot shaped the three products PoINT offers today: PoINT Storage Manager, PoINT Archival Gateway and PoINT Data Replicator.

Why data tiering is back on the agenda

Thalmann says that the industry has reached a point where data tiering is no longer optional. “Don’t put your petabytes of cold and ‘to‑be‑archived’ data on expensive flash and hard disk,” he says, because economically speaking, Flash and HDD prices continue to rise, cloud storage costs are unpredictable, and the volume of inactive data is growing faster than the volume of active data.

PoINT’s view is that organisations need to combine three approaches:

• Tiering cold data to lower‑cost storage using software‑defined policies
• Using storage systems with low cost per terabyte and no energy consumption for inactive data, which today means tape
• Using object storage with standardised S3 interfaces for scalability, availability and long‑term access.

Tape, in particular, has re‑emerged as a strategic technology. “Currently, tape is the only storage media which exactly fulfils these requirements,” Thalmann said. It offers air‑gapping, low energy use, predictable long‑term costs and high capacity. With LTO‑9 and LTO‑10, tape performance and density have increased significantly, and many organisations are now using tape as a complement to disk‑based object storage.

PoINT’s software is designed to make these transitions seamless.

PoINT Storage Manager, originally launched in 2007, is the company’s longest‑standing product. It provides file‑based tiering and archiving across a wide range of storage systems: NAS, object storage, tape libraries and cloud services.

The concept is straightforward. Files on primary storage are analysed against policies, for example, ‘not used for six months’, and automatically moved to secondary or archive storage. The file remains visible to users through stubs or links, but the primary storage no longer holds the data. “Physically, files are moved; logically, the file link is still present,” Thalmann explains.

The product supports Windows, NetApp, Dell EMC and generic NAS systems. It also includes a WORM file system for immutable archiving, where files become locked as soon as they are closed.

One of the largest deployments is at Daimler, which uses PoINT Storage Manager to move cold data from NetApp and EMC systems into a private object storage cloud across two sites. According to Thalmann, the company saved millions by avoiding expansion of its primary storage estate.

PoINT’s most distinctive product, and the one attracting the most attention, is PoINT Archival Gateway, an S3‑to‑tape object storage system released in 2021. It acts as a native object store that writes directly to tape libraries, supporting both LTO and IBM Jaguar formats.

Unlike file‑system‑based approaches, Archival Gateway is built as a true object storage platform with S3 compatibility. It uses scalable interface nodes to handle thousands of parallel S3 connections and database nodes to maintain the metadata catalogue. This architecture allows it to scale from small autoloaders to installations with 12 libraries and up to 384 tape drives.

A key differentiator is its ability to write directly to tape without requiring large disk buffers. This reduces hardware requirements and lowers cost, though it does depend on the client application providing data at sufficient speed.

The system also supports optional disk storage classes, mirroring the structure of Amazon S3’s storage tiers. Lifecycle policies, standard in the S3 specification, control the movement of objects between disk and tape.

PoINT has also implemented erasure coding on tape, which increases both redundancy and performance. “With erasure coding… you are writing to four tapes at the same time, so you have three times higher performance,” Thalmann explains. This approach also allows the system to read from multiple tapes in parallel when retrieving an object.

The product is used in several large‑scale environments, including:

• European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), with a three‑digit petabyte range across LTO and Jaguar
• PostFinance in Switzerland, using geo‑distributed redundancy
• A Spanish government ministry, replicating NetApp StorageGRID data to tape
• Cloud providers, including installations where PoINT’s REST API is integrated into multi‑tenant platforms.

One US deployment required two fully redundant sites hundreds of kilometres apart, with 60ms latency between them. PoINT adapted its algorithms to keep databases synchronised and maintain failover capability.

The newest product in the portfolio is PoINT Data Replicator, designed to move data between file systems, object storage and S3‑compatible targets. It supports S3‑to‑S3 replication, file‑to‑S3 migration and continuous backup workflows.

A key design choice is that the original file path becomes the object key, preserving structure and making retrieval straightforward. The product is also integrated with Archival Gateway, using tape‑aware read‑sorting to keep drives streaming and avoid excessive repositioning.

Use cases include:

• Cloud repatriation
• Backup of object storage systems that lack native tape support
• Synchronisation between different object storage vendors
• Migration from legacy NAS to S3.

 A focus on sovereignty and sustainability

Thalmann highlights the importance of cloud repatriation, noting that many customers are moving data off public cloud due to cost unpredictability and data sovereignty concerns.

PoINT positions itself as a European alternative to US‑centric storage ecosystems, “avoiding external supply dependencies by using software made in Europe,” Thalmann says.

The company recently received the EU Commission’s ‘Go Green and Resilient’ award and the ‘Software Made in Europe’ label.

Tape’s sustainability benefits are central to this message. Tape consumes no energy when inactive, generates less electronic waste, and offers long media life. “FujiFilm says 30 years,” Thalmann notes. In an era of rising energy prices and environmental scrutiny, these attributes matter.

Data sovereignty is another driver. With geopolitical tensions rising, organisations are increasingly cautious about where their data resides and who controls the underlying platforms. On‑premises object storage combined with tape offers a predictable, sovereign alternative to hyperscale cloud storage.

For channel partners, resellers, MSPs and integrators, PoINT’s portfolio opens several opportunities:

• Helping customers reduce primary storage costs through tiering
• Building sovereign, on‑prem object storage solutions with tape as a deep archive
• Supporting cloud repatriation projects
• Providing long‑term archiving for compliance‑driven sectors
• Offering backup for object storage systems that lack native tape support.

PoINT sells almost entirely through the channel, working with distributors and integrators across Europe. Its technology partners include Spectra Logic, IBM, Quantum, Cloudian and BDT, the latter being the world’s largest manufacturer of tape mechanisms.

One notable collaboration is the Orion appliance, developed jointly by BDT, PoINT and system integrator COMBACK. The appliance integrates PoINT Archival Gateway directly into BDT’s tape library hardware, offering an S3‑native tape archive in a single system.

PoINT Software & Systems may not yet be a well-known name in the UK channel, but its work sits at the centre of a major evolution in data management. As organisations confront spiralling storage costs, compliance pressures and the need for sovereign, sustainable infrastructure, PoINT’s approach, combining object storage, tape and intelligent tiering, is gaining traction.

Thalmann says: “Put the right data on the right storage system,” and in a world where cold data is growing faster than IT budgets, that message is resonating more than ever.