QStar Technologies

QStar was founded in 1987 in Bethesda, Maryland by Brian Swafford. Its European headquarters was established in Milan, Italy in 1994. The company's corporate headquarters is located in Navarre, Florida, with a network of distributors and resellers.

QStar develops archive and data management software for storage devices. It supports several archive technologies (Tape, Optical, RDX, RAID, object storage and cloud) from several archive vendors. Options include proprietary and industry-standard file systems, such as Linear Tape File System and Universal Disk Format.

QStar promotes a policy where three copies of data are stored, consisting of a performance copy, a secure copy and a disaster recovery copy. Ideally this is achieved using a blend of two storage technologies - disk based and removable media. One copy always needs to be off-site at a remote site.

In 2010, QStar helped found the Active Archive Alliance a collaborative industry association to educate end user organizations on new technologies designed to help reliably store and retrieve archived data.

Archive Manager —Archive software to manage LTO tape and optical (including Blu-ray) storage libraries and other archive technologies

Archive Replicator —file-based replication for local and remote archive storage providing automatic disaster protection

Data Director —block-based mirroring of media within one or multiple archive storage libraries

Simulated Media Library -- Virtual Optical and Tape library software to run on RAID hardware

Network Migrator —Policy-based tiered storage and data lifecycle management automated tiered storage with data migration

Master and Axxess -- Tertiary Archive software to manage CD and DVD storage libraries

SntrySTR – Archive Storage Appliance with pre-installed QStar software