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StorageTek Drives High-End Success With T9940B Tape Drive

Unmatched reliability, blazing speed and massive capacity are its hallmarks. T9940B is its name. StorageTek's T9940B is staking its claim as the high-capacity tape drive of choice for performance computing environments and networks. Now, with new features and attachment to smaller libraries, customers, partners and analysts agree; the StorageTek T9940B is the hardest working tape drive in the industry.

StorageTek, a storage services and solutions expert, has achieved extensive partner support and rapid market adoption for the T9940B, announced late September, and was recently honored as an MVP Award finalist in the backup hardware category for Storage World Conference, May 5-9. The T9940B gives businesses rapid access to large volumes of information at a very attractive price per gigabyte. Its speed has been demonstrated during testing in Toulouse, France, where it transferred an average of more than 28 megabytes per second of uncompressed data onto a single tape drive, and has been proven in live customer environments. In the customer environment this translates to performance that pleases users, and, balanced with a cost of ownership, impresses CFOs.

"The T9940B drive demonstrates StorageTek's commitment to delivering enterprise-class tape technology to its customers," said Robert Amatruda, research manager for tape and removable storage, IDC. "StorageTek continues to build on its successful T9940-series family of tape drives to address the growing data-protection needs of its customers."

"The San Diego Supercomputer Center sees an explosive growth of data collections in academic research," said Phil Andrews, director of High End Computing, San Diego Supercomputing Center. "Moving to StorageTek T9940B tape drive technology allows us to meet these emerging needs. The recent acquisition of 24 T9940B drives expands SDSC's overall archive capacity from 500 terabytes to roughly six petabytes due to the large [200 gigabyte] cartridge capacities. Transfer rates of the T9940B are also impressive, with a measured aggregate of 828 megs per second write transfer across the 24 drives!

"Furthermore, the aggregate transfer rates that SDSC can achieve with this technology, coupled with a large disk cache will allow very large, terabyte-size data collections to appear nearline to researchers. This in turn will allow SDSC to reduce staging times for large data collections and keep the massive computer systems running at full capacity."

"We have been delighted but not surprised by demand for the T9940B tape drive," said Gary Francis, corporate vice president and general manager, Automated Tape Solutions, StorageTek. Francis added, "We have developed a winning tape drive that supports the demands of today's businesses in terms of reliability, performance and capacity. Independent software vendors are lining up to support the T9940B. This widespread industry support endorses the benefits that the T9940B brings our customers."

Additional Features:

• VolSafe Secure Media Technology: VolSafe, the original WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) tape-based storage solution, gained significant market acceptance in the T9840 technology and is currently used by customers all over the world to meet regulatory agency compliance. This capability is extended to the T9940B tape drive and 9940 media. VolSafe technology meets the most stringent requirements of the SEC for compliance in regulated businesses.
• The T9940B tape drive is now supported in high-performance L180 automated tape libraries. Storing three times more data per cartridge than the first-generation T9940A, users can consolidate data from larger libraries into the smaller L180 library without sacrificing throughput performance. An L180 library with 174 slots and six T9940B tape drives provides over 34.8 TB capacity and 648 GB/hour throughput (2:1 data compression).

For details on SDSC's data transfer milestone, see www.sdsc.edu/Press/02/112102_data_transfer.html.

For more information about StorageTek's T9940B tape drive, please visit www.storagetek.com/prodserv/products/tape/t9940b/.

What StorageTek Partners Say About the T9940B

Brocade Software

"Leading companies rely on Brocade and StorageTek to deliver the highest levels of performance and reliability for their mission-critical enterprise applications," said Jay Kidd, Brocade vice president of Product Management. "The Brocade intelligent platform for networking storage, which StorageTek delivers to its customers worldwide, helps companies simplify the implementation of SANs, reduce the total cost of ownership of data storage environments, and improve network and application efficiency. We are pleased to work closely with StorageTek, as it delivers the latest offering in StorageTek's tape drive family, the T9940B."

Computer Associates

"Cost-effective expansion of storage capacity and the streamlining of storage management operations are two of our customers' top concerns," said Gary McGuire, senior vice president, BrightStor solutions at Computer Associates' BrightStor solutions. "StorageTek's T9940B tape drive will help them address these concerns -- especially when deployed in conjunction with CA's automated, high-performance BrightStor backup solutions."

Emulex

"Emulex works closely with StorageTek to ensure delivery of world-class storage networking solutions with the performance and scalability that our data center customers demand," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of Worldwide Marketing at Emulex Corporation. "As the world's leading supplier of Fibre Channel host bus adapters, Emulex is confident that its connectivity solutions, combined with the T9920B's mainframe functionality and 2Gb/s Fibre Channel speeds, will help ensure the reliable back up of critical data."

IBM Tivoli

"IBM Tivoli Storage Manager supports a broad array of tape drives. The addition of StorageTek's high-speed, high-volume tape drive, combined with our backup and recovery software, helps customers protect their storage network data," said Laura Sanders, vice president Storage, IBM Tivoli Software.

Imation

"IT managers around the world depend on Imation and StorageTek for safeguarding their most valuable asset -- their data. The extension of the T9940 platform enables customers to increase capacity and performance using existing 9940 cartridges," said Ron Zinke, vice president and general manager, Imation Data Storage Media and Services. "By partnering with StorageTek to develop 9940 technology, Imation continues to build on its 50 years of tape storage expertise by developing faster, higher capacity, reliable removable media."

LEGATO

"IT managers are most concerned with cost and performance when choosing storage solutions. By leveraging the LEGATO NetWorker enterprise-class data protection and media management capabilities for SANs in tandem with StorageTek's high speed T9940B tape drives, businesses can protect and recover their environment faster and reduce total cost of ownership," commented Victoria Grey, vice president, Information Protection, LEGATO Systems, Inc.

McDATA

"StorageTek and McDATA have a common goal of providing the most scalable, secure and reliable storage solutions available to customers large and small, and share the commitment to delivering products that address real customer needs with products that are bullet-proof, future-proof and easy to manage," said John Kelley, president and CEO, McDATA Corp. "With the launch of the T9940B tape drive StorageTek extends their leadership in data storage and disaster recovery solutions."

QLogic Corp

"Today more than ever, IT professionals need tape technology that can drive down the cost of their backup and archival operations," said Joseph Kimpler, director of business alliances, QLogic Corp. "With a built-in, high-speed, Fibre Channel interface, powered by QLogic, the T9940B tape drive dramatically reduces storage networking costs."