The hardware, which offers retrieval of data based on metadata and not hash keys, is aimed squarely at taking market share from EMC Corp.'s Centera content-addressed storage array.

'This thing puts [Copan] into the archiving game with a much better price/performance,' said Arun Taneja, founder of research firm Teneja Group in Hopkinton, Mass.

The new array, the Revolution 200A, was announced at Storage Decisions and is based on the company's existing hardware platform. The hardware will be widely available in January and will sell for about US$3 per gigabyte of capacity, according to CEO Roger Archibald.

Unlike its predecessor, the Revolution 200T, which emulated a tape library to backup servers, the upgraded model allows IT administrators to store data in file format for long-term archival.

Peter Carucci, a technology consultant who works for the New York Stock Exchange Inc. (NYSE), said he could see the NYSE's IT department adopting the technology because of its ability to archive online hundreds of terabytes of data in a single rack. 'We're definitely going to look at it,' he said.