Quantum, ADIC boost backups

Quantum and ADIC announced separately last week products designed to let customers use a mix of tape cartridges to archive data and support information life-cycle management.

The ability to intermix media types, including Limited Tape Open (LTO), Super Digital Linear Tape (SDLT) and Ultra Density Optical (UDO), is an increasingly important feature, says Dianne McAdam, senior analyst at the Data Mobility Group.

"If the SDLT cartridges can store more capacity than the LTO cartridges, then you can tell the back-up software to send large jobs to the SDLT pool and smaller jobs to the LTO pool," she says.

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Quantum and ADIC announced separately last week products designed to let customers use a mix of tape cartridges to archive data and support information life-cycle management.

The ability to intermix media types, including Limited Tape Open (LTO), Super Digital Linear Tape (SDLT) and Ultra Density Optical (UDO), is an increasingly important feature, says Dianne McAdam, senior analyst at the Data Mobility Group.

"If the SDLT cartridges can store more capacity than the LTO cartridges, then you can tell the back-up software to send large jobs to the SDLT pool and smaller jobs to the LTO pool," she says.

Quantum's PX500 Series consists of the PX502, PX506 and PX510 modular systems for backing up, recovering and archiving customer data. The systems include Quantum's FlexLink architecture, which allows them to be stacked and linked via infrared technology.

"Scalable growth is very cool, but I like that in three years you can rip them apart and let different departments repurpose them. They have a far longer useful life than most tape libraries," says Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group.

The PX500 series can be configured with SDLT 600, LTO-2 or LTO-3 drive cartridges. They also support hot-swappable drives, redundant power supplies and SCSI or Fibre Channel connectivity. A Web-based management console also is available.

The models range from 4U to 18U in size and support as many as 576G bytes of data an hour on the low end to 2,880G bytes per hour on the high end. The smallest of the new boxes starts at less than $12,000; the high-end system starts at $33,000.

Archiving support

ADIC's AMASS 5.5 is near-line archiving software for network- and direct-attached storage environments that supports ADIC, as well as tape libraries and DVD and optical libraries from such vendors as IBM and Sun.

AMASS 5.5 has the capability to support mixed media - including SDLT, LTO, AIT or UDO - and migrate data from one media type to another. This means that customers can manage large, file-based data sets over long periods and enable policies that automatically direct the migration of data.

AMASS 5.5 includes ADIC's Infinite File Life (IFL) technology to support all generations of LTO tape media. IFL tests the integrity of data stored on an LTO cartridge and send it to new media when specified error-rate thresholds are met.

AMASS 5.5 starts at $14,800.

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