Features - Storage Innovations:

EXABYTE, TOLIS OFFER 1ST MULTI-DRIVE TAPE BACKUP FOR OS X

Exabyte Corporation, a performance and value leader in tape backup systems, announced recently that TOLIS Group has certified the Exabyte 221L LTO Ultrium tape library for Mac OS X, Apple's Unix-based operating system. In conjunction with the Mac OS X version of TOLIS Group's BRU Command Line Interface (CLI) data protection software, the Exabyte 221L is the first tape storage solution to provide multiple drive back up and restore for Apple's Mac OS X operating system over Fibre Channel or SCSI. The collaboration has resulted in a first-of-its-kind storage solution for Mac OS X -- a low-cost, rapidly deployable, high-performance storage back up and restore solution that perfectly complements Apple's Xserve and Xserve RAID server and storage offerings.

"Mac OS X, Xserve and Xserve RAID combine to make a powerful corporate computing platform, and BRU solutions combined with Exabyte's automation and tape technology provide the perfect tool to protect critical enterprise data," said Tim Jones, president of TOLIS Group. "We're particularly excited about how fast the solution is. We're seeing sustainable BRU CLI throughput performance in excess of 66.5 MB/sec from Apple's Xserve RAID storage platforms with combined dual-drive throughput to the Exabyte 221L native Fibre Channel library of over 40 MB/sec. In this configuration, the solution will back up 108 GB/hr."

Exabyte's line of LTO automation solutions is designed to support the needs of a variety of environments, from desktop to enterprise applications. Ranging from 10-cartridge autoloaders to 150-cartridge library solutions, users are offered automated data storage solutions providing up to 60 TB of capacity (compressed) and throughput of up to 1.7 TB/hr (compressed). The Exabyte 221L LTO Ultrium tape library provides world-class automation for departmental workgroup back up and restore operations. The 221L can be configured with one or two LTO tape drives and up to 21 data cartridges and is available in either SCSI or native Fibre Channel configurations. With a native Fibre Channel option, the 221L is ideal and cost-effective for use in SAN applications. The 221L offers the flexibility to upgrade to next-generation tape drives as capacities and system performance rates increase by simply replacing the tape drive. The 221L's compact 5U design allows it to be used as a tabletop or rack-mounted device, making it the ideal solution for space-constrained, budget-conscious data centers.

The 221L is the only library in its class to offer a native Fibre Channel interface to both the tape drives and the robotics, eliminating the need for an internal bridge or router. As a result, performance bottlenecks are eliminated and a costly point of failure is avoided. The result is a faster, more reliable back up and restore operation.

"The TOLIS BRU CLI and Exabyte 221L solution on Apple's Mac OS X, Xserve and Xserve RAID combine the ease-of-use, capacity, performance and reliability Mac users want when backing up critical enterprise data, including digital video, audio tracks, multimedia graphics and other storage-intensive applications," said Tom Ward, president and CEO of Exabyte. "With its first- and-only multi-drive back up and restore capabilities for Mac OS X, this is a great storage solution for the Mac community, and our demos at NAB will show off its tremendous speed and unmatched ease of use, creating a superior price-performance value."

The TOLIS Group's BRU CLI data protection software for Mac OS X systems fulfills the need for easy-to-administer, reliable "headless" backup for Apple's Xserve and Xserve RAID. BRU CLI audits every bit during back up and restore operations. Each backup can be 100 percent verified using an out-ofband process that reduces the total backup window of a bit-level verified backup operation by 50 percent. Further, BRU CLI implements TOLIS' advanced data recovery algorithms to assure the return of the most data of any backup tool should data become corrupted; BRU CLI will not abort the restore as other solutions would.

BRU CLI protects the data on the Xserve internal ATA hard drives, externally attached SCSI drives and arrays, and the Fibre-Channel connected Xserve RAID storage subsystem. Implemented on Xserve, BRU CLI supports SCSI, Fibre-Channel, Firewire and USB tape drives. SCSI and Fibre-Channel libraries are supported as well. Additionally, BRU CLI will also write to removable media, disk farms, and even devices like the USB ThumbDrive/PenDrive.

BRU CLI's small footprint allows multiple processes to easily drive multiple tape drives simultaneously with a minimal increase in system load. BRU CLI properly backs-up and restores all file elements including data fork, resource fork, finder info, and UNIX permission attributes. Remote file systems can be easily mounted and backed-up. Also, BRU CLI includes TOLIS' tapectl and libctl tools. These command line tools are used to manage tape drives (rewind, erase, append, setblk, etc.) and tape libraries (load, unload and inventory) to support these devices under Apple's Mac OS X operating system.