Advanced Digital Information (ADIC) has announced a new kind of
tape library that is smaller and less expensive than existing
systems.
The Scalar 24 will ship with some of the high-end features found in
ADIC's much larger tape libraries but has a price tag targeted at
small and medium-sized businesses, said Steve Whitner, ADIC's
director of marketing. The new library, available in October, will
include high-end components such as the latest drive technology and
remote management tools and will start at $12,000 (£7,733) for a
unit with a single drive.
"It's the first library that we have ever offered that puts
together enterprise backup features with very high value," Whitner
said. "The whole goal is to get more functionality and make it for
less cost."
As a medium for storing corporate data and performing backups,
magnetic tapes are less expensive than disks and are especially
useful for archiving large amounts of data. ADIC, based in Redmond,
Washington, USA, already sells the much larger Scalar 100, 1,000
and 10K tape libraries, which allow companies to back up and store
huge amounts of information from servers or other storage systems.
The new Scalar 24 library can hold as many as 24 tapes in a system
4U (7 inches) high. It supports both LTO 1 (linear tape-open) and
Super DLT320 (digital linear tape) drives. The system will ship
with some high-end features such as remote management software,
partitioning technology to turn the Scalar 24 into two small
virtual libraries, and the ability to connect the drive to a
storage area network (SAN).
The system is designed for companies that have as many as 550Gbytes
of data that must be backed up, Whitner said.