Exabyte's SMB Storage Offerings
Exabyte's SMB Offerings
April 11th, 2006: The automation company aims firmly at the middle-market to bring a raft of tape offerings.
First off the blocks is the Magnum 224 LTO library. The unit ships with one or two half-height LTO-2 drives or one full-height LTO-3 drive and one or two 12-cartridge magazines.
The Magnum 224 scales to a maximum of 4.8Tb compressed, with compressed speeds of up to 172Gb per hour. The 2U-high appliance includes a bar code reader as standard, four SCSI ports, and Ethernet and USB ports. The system retails at $2,500.
Speaking to IDM, Richard Giddey, Exabyte's manager in Australia and New Zealand explained that research had made it clear that modularising systems was too simply too complicated for most SMEs. "For example, fitting a barcode reader alone was a return to base operation, and the reader itself would cost around $2,000."
Exabytes next offering is the VXA-172 Packet Drive and VXA-172 PacketLoader offering large capacity (172Gb - compressed), high-speed tape cartridges that can be removed to an off-site location for safekeeping.
Tape cartridges for the VXA-172 products are the only tape products available in two sizes: the X6 at 80-gigabytes and the X10 at 172-gigabytes selling for prices of $25 and $50 respectively. The VXA-172 starts $1,185 excluding GST.
According to the company, "The key to Exabyte's award-winning VXA technology is that instead of traditional, vulnerable data tracks, data is recorded in small sections or packets, similar to how data is delivered over the Internet. This efficient method of recording data provides superior capacity, speed and error-proof integrity when restoring data. As the only storage media format to use Packet Technology, VXA is regarded as the worldwide leader in capacity, speed, reliability and value for small-to-midsize businesses. VXA is so reliable that it is up to 180 times more likely to properly restore data than other tape formats such as DDS/DAT - even from a damaged tape. VXA tape cartridges have been disaster-tested under the most severe conditions - including violent vibration, in blowing volcanic dust, freezing inside blocks of ice, boiling water and even hot coffee - to prove they can provide reliable and complete data restores."
Exabytes big sell for its new SME-offerings are summed up by Richard Giddey, "The vast majority of servers sold to small and midsized businesses today have more than 100 gigabytes of disk space, which poses a significant dilemma when trying to back up and secure that much data with old lower-capacity tape like DDS/DAT or optical media. Not only are other tape formats and other backup mediums impractical, expensive, and difficult to manage, they can undermine the safety and security of an organisation's long-term data protection."
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