ENGINEERING

Advanced Digital Information Corporation, leading provider of Intelligent Storage solutions for the open system, announced today that the company will add the IBM TotalStorage 3592 enterprise tape drive to the list of supported technologies offered in its largest backup and archive tape library, the Scalar 10K. By integrating high performance, fast access 3592 drives and media, ADIC's Scalar 10K lets end users more effectively consolidate all of their tape-based applications for enterprise backup and archiving in a single high capacity, high availability solution fully backed by a consolidated service team. The announcement provides important new options for IT departments in data intensive industries where certain access to very large data sets is paramount, including science and engineering, imaging applications in oil and gas exploration, geospatial data analysis, and specialized satellite imagery capture. The new drive technology provides a natural complement to ADIC's StorNext data management software, widely used to manage large data sets in these same environments. The IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Drive 3592 is the industry's premier large form-factor enterprise-class tape drive, offering high capacity, high sustained throughput, rapid search speeds, and reliability in high duty cycle environments. Offering positions for up to 208 drives and 11,386 tape cartridges, the Scalar 10K becomes the industry's largest single library for any drive in the large-form factor, enterprise tape drive class. It is the first system using drives of this class to offer more than 3 Petabytes of data in a single system, without using pass-through ports or robot-to-robot cartridge exchanges. The Scalar 10K is also the only fully-supported independent library solution for enterprise tape drives. "The Scalar 10K is the first library system to combine high availability library architecture and multi-petabyte capacity with the 3592's high performance drive technology," said Bill Britts, ADIC Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "Integrating 3592 technology allows us to offer IT departments a solution that can consolidate even the most challenging backup and archive tasks in a single solution. Combined with the heterogeneous support offered by ADIC's StorNext data management software, this new library will form the core of a solution that will meet users' changing storage needs far into the future." "IBM enterprise tape drives are designed to provide high capacity and performance for storing mission critical data," said Glen Allen, Director of OEM Storage Products at IBM. "The integration of the 3592 into the ADIC Scalar 10K library is recognition of the 3592's reputation for quality and performance. Combining IBM's drive technology with ADIC's scalable, high performance Scalar 10K library provides end users an important new choice that can help solve their most critical on-going data storage needs." The Scalar 10K is the first library available for enterprise-class drives to offer high availability options that include a parallel, dual-aisle design with fully redundant robotics and controllers. The dual-aisle Scalar 10K provides fast, dual robotic cartridge retrieval times, and it allows the library to remain operational with continuous access to key user data through virtually all normal service procedures and fault conditions. The Scalar 10K, which earlier this year announced support for the latest LTO-3 drive models, now allows users to mix 3592 technology with LTO and SDLT drives and media in a single system. For all the technologies, the library features capacity-on-demand scalability to provide a seamless growth path. The 3592 drives offer cartridge capacities of up to 300 GB per tape (native), 40 MB/second native throughput per drive, and 8 meter/second on-tape search speeds for fast access to data. The Scalar 10K can store up to 11,386 3592 cartridges for up to 3.416 native petabytes of data.