Features - Storage Innovations:

QUALSTAR ANNOUNCES LTO 3 EQUIPPED TAPE LIBRARIES

Qualstar Corp, a manufacturer of automated tape storage solutions, today announced that it has qualified IBM LTO Ultrium 3 tape drives in all models of its tape libraries. Qualstar's TLS-Series and RLS-Series tape libraries and TeraLoader autoloaders provide customers with a particularly broad range of capacity, performance and format options. Shipments will begin by the end of the month.

LTO 3 is the latest iteration of the Ultrium tape format jointly developed by IBM, HP and Certance, and first introduced in 2000. LTO 3 doubles the capacity and performance of today's popular LTO 2 drive. LTO 3's higher capacity and data transfer rate mean faster data backups and restores at lower cost, a key consideration for companies with sharply escalating storage requirements and shrinking backup windows. All Qualstar LTO 3 libraries reflect the company's commitment to building Simply Reliable products that deliver solid technical and business benefits.

The TLS-8000 Series economically and reliably automates tape-based applications, whether backing up a single critical database or as an integral part of an enterprise-wide storage management system. Capacities range from 4.4TB to more than 211TB using typical data compression techniques. Six TLS models provide a broad range of cost-effective solutions, housing one to eight LTO 3 tape drives and up to 264 tapes.

Qualstar's RLS-Series of LTO 3-equipped rack mount libraries offers three models which house up to 44 tapes, yielding capacities that exceed 35TB and data transfer rates exceeding 1TB per hour, using compression. Qualstar's RLS-Series libraries offer the widest range of features and options in the market to enable users to economically design a solution to meet their individual requirements, including:

• True hot-swappable tape drives.

• Dual, redundant, hot-swappable power supplies.

• 2Gb/second SANSmart Fibre Channel interface.

• VIOP, an exclusive Qualstar feature, allowing users to set the number of storage slots dedicated to tape I/O operations.

• Q-Link, Qualstar's browser-based remote library manager, enabling users to configure, monitor, diagnose and manage libraries from anywhere in the world.

"Qualstar LTO 3 libraries meet our customers' increasing need for fast, high density, and exceptionally cost-effective data protection," said Bob Covey, Qualstar's vice president of marketing. "The new LTO 3 drives in our TLS- and RLS- Series libraries deliver excellent value for new customers, and provide our large installed base with a comprehensive expansion and upgrade path."