New Storage Hardware Recycling Program Benefits Charity
Junk-A-Juke program provides free archive and storage systems in exchange for donated end-of-life optical jukeboxes or legacy storage devices
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KOM Networks announced that its Junk-A-Juke program will collect and recycle obsolete and legacy storage equipment and donate all of the money generated from raw materials to the Feed the Children charity. In exchange for the older equipment, KOM offers a new Dell Powered KOMpliance Archive with equal capacity and better performance, a fully compliant enterprise-class server and archive solution free of charge with a three-year maintenance agreement. KOM’s goal is to collect and recycle enough hardware to feed one million children.
The first system has already been donated from aptly named Angel Medical Center in Franklin, NC. “We already had plans to upgrade our current system and were impressed with KOM’s ability to help us easily migrate our data and meet our HIPAA compliance standards,” said Gary Hanold, director of information systems at Angel Medical. There was no additional cost and KOM guaranteed that Angel’s end-of-life jukebox wouldn’t be sent to a landfill.
KOMpliance is a plug-and-play archive solution that is platform- and application-agnostic to easily integrate into any existing infrastructure. Organizations use KOM solutions to protect, access, and manage their data and meet their compliance standards. With the Junk-A-Juke program, KOM makes it easy to responsibly discard obsolete hardware and help feed many of the twelve million American children who are today at risk of going hungry. The program also lowers financial barriers and makes it easy and affordable to upgrade old data archive and storage technology to get compliant.
“Gartner’s market research indicates a healthy demand for active archiving solutions, and file-based archiving solutions are a fast growing segment of this market,” said Sheila Childs, research director with Gartner. “While file archiving technologies enable better management of storage growth and cost, an organization’s requirement to retain information for long periods of time often necessitates continued replacement of inefficient, antiquated and obsolete hardware to preserve data in readable formats.”
“When times are tough, businesses need to be more responsible in helping out where they can, so we tried to think about ways we could help. There are still large numbers of obsolete archive and storage devices being used,” said Kamel Shaath, CTO of KOM Networks. “Our free storage upgrade to KOMpliance will increase efficiency, protect data, and lower liability, risk, and TCO; but the opportunity to protect our planet for future generations and feed hungry children today is our motivation. KOM will match the funds generated by the recycled hardware to help Feed The Children.”
KOM has partnered with Technology Conservation Group (TCG) to pick up and track each piece of equipment through destruction to ensure that nothing is sent to a landfill. TCG is an ISO-registered recycler of electronic scrap and a member of NAID, the National Association for Information Destruction, a trade association providing the standards and ethics for the information destruction industry to ensure total compliant destruction of functional drives. TCG is reducing the processing costs by 25 percent to increase the value of the proceeds that will be donated to the charity.
More information is available at www.komnetworks.com.