Tape library to control growing data flow

Jul 19, 2005: The Exabyte 221L Plus Tape Library with LTO-3, and a native Fibre Channel interface, has been designed to link up with SAN applications and control intensive data storage volumes.

It has two LTO-3 drives, 21 cartridge slots and is built with ExaBotics to provide flawless robotics operations. It also has a capacity of up to 16.8 TB and a data transfer speed of more than 1.1 TB per hour to support the growing storage needs of enterprise customers.

In addition, the native Fibre Channel connectivity eliminates the need for an internal bridge or router, which avoids performance bottlenecks.

Tom Ward, the president and CEO of Exabyte, said that the 221L Plus is designed to offer the lowest total cost ownership in the category, especially for the high-volume data environments of data centres and the intensive multi-media data storage needs of Mac users.

"The benefits of native Fibre Channel and Exabyte's world-class robotics ensure its industry-leading reliability and performance to further reduce the overall cost of tape automation."

Exabyte also claims that the 221L offers unsurpassed connectivity reliability, insuring streaming maximum FC data bandwidth into each drive independently for optimal drive performance.

The data for each drive is independently streamed rather than fed into a single bus or port, meaning that the potential for a single point of library or drive failure, which eliminates throughput bottlenecks and avoids the extra expense, time and possible breakdowns related to adding a new router into the SAN.

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