Features - Storage Innovations:

ADIC EXPANDS ALERTING FUNCTIONS IN NEW, INTELLIGENT LIBRARY

Advanced Digital Information Corporation, a leading supplier of Intelligent Storage solutions for the open system market, announced that the company has expanded the monitoring and alerting capabilities in its Scalar i2000 library to further reduce end users' overall system ownership costs, improve diagnostics and reduce the need for service. The new capabilities gather and analyze drive and media status information, provide users with detailed diagnostic information and turn the data into e-mail or pager alerts for IT administrators and the library service team. The new function helps users and service personnel more easily differentiate between drive and media faults, and it will provide a mechanism to actively warn users when supported media is approaching the end of its active life. The new, intelligent capabilities can help users to reduce the need for service calls, shorten system down-time and better manage use of their storage resources to reduce overall costs.

"A significant amount of information is potentially available about drives and media from internal sensors, but there hasn't been a good way of capturing it, making sense out of it, or using it for decision making," said Lisa Clarke, vice president of global services at ADIC. "ADIC has now changed that with the Scalar i2000. We have linked the status data to our proactive alerting system so that users and service personnel can be notified directly when media is bad, for example. And we present all the information about the library system -- including drives and media -- through a single management interface to make diagnostics and service easier."

The new capabilities also create a management environment that will enable the development of systems that combine disk and tape as part of a single backup process. "Most libraries force users to try to extract drive and media information from logs buried in their backup application," explained Scott Roza, ADIC's vice president of north american storage products. "Creating self-managing libraries that present that data directly is a much better approach -- analogous to the monitoring systems common today in disk subsystems. This kind of advanced function will be especially important as we boost the performance and overall reliability of backup by integrating a disk layer between the library and backup software."

ADIC's Scalar i2000 automated library is the first product to incorporate ADIC's intelligent iPlatform architecture. The iPlatform integrates key backup management functions and offers built-in support for a broad range of data center requirements while reducing the need for external servers, applications and management activities.

Functions integrated within Scalar i2000 models include native partitioning of a single library into multiple logical libraries, mixed media capability, performance monitoring, proactive system readiness and path verification checks, path fail-over, performance optimization, self-guided diagnostics and policy-based user alerts that are sent over standard e-mail and pager networks. The iPlatform's server-class embedded controller displays real-time backup performance data and gathers information to be used for future predictive analysis. It also incorporates a unique capacity-on-demand capability, allowing users to expand capacity from 100 to over 2200 cartridges, paying for added capacity only as they use it.