This German manufacturer's change of strategy was announced in November 2008 following emphatic customer request. At the release party, business owner Herbert Grau discussed the determining factor as being a need for long-term, secure availability for the software, and his hope for an abundance of diverse contributions and creative ideas from the Open Source community.

OpenArchive is a no-frills, streamlined version of Grau Data's ArchiveManager and is equipped with an almost identical scope of operation to the commercial version. For users not required to submit to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and who don't need certification from other software manufacturers, there is a scalable, transparent, and free solution for archiving and backup purposes up into the petabyte range, which is available from OpenArchive and advertised as “The Final Destination for your Data.”

Popular applications are obtained via APIs and protocols such as CIFS or NFS as files ranging into the billions in revision-safe WORM (“write once, read many”) file system. Also, repeated storage via disk-to-disk-to-tape and archive volumes amounting to more than 1TB up to multiple petabytes are made possible. Using ArchiveManager, the Grau Data-developed MillionBillionFileSystem (MBFS) is employed for this purpose, which compensates for the limitations of the Linux and Windows file systems and also functions more rapidly. For example, the subdirectories are administered by the MBFS as file systems, which also organizes Inodes and entries of the Master File Tables hierarchically.