New Oracle Tape System ‘Trickles Down’ to Midrangers

Some skeptics would call Oracle’s new low-end tape storage system a “dumbing down” of a more sophisticated, large-enterprise deployment. Others might describe it simply as the result of the “trickle-down effect” from large enterprise equipment down to small and midsized businesses.

Oracle itself simply explains the StorageTek SL150 Modular Tape Library it launched July 18 as the “lowest-cost scalable tape library on the market.” That point certainly may be nothing but “marketspeak,” but the fact is, there are not many virtual tape libraries that come anywhere near the cost reach of a midrange business.

These are generally not inexpensive investments, but pricing is a major factor in this case; you can snag one of these beginner tape arrays for less than $6,000.

Some stats on the new machine, according to its designer/maker:

• Scales from 30 to 300 slots and up to 900TB of capacity, giving customers ample room to grow in a single tape library.
• Offers easy-to-use management via an intuitive graphical user interface built on Oracle Fusion middleware and Linux. Users can view and navigate drive, library and media information without dealing with cumbersome file structure drill-downs.
• Can be installed in as few as 30 minutes, provided one knows what he or she is doing.
• Capacity can be added quickly using the library’s USB-based auto-discovery system to find new expansion modules.
• Supports a wide range of open systems environments, as long as they are Oracle’s, namely Solaris and Linux, Exadata Database Machine, Database Appliance, SPARC and Sun x86 servers and Sun Storage.

If you have a digital tape component in your strategic plan, and a lot of companies still do for compliance and myriad other reasons, you probably should check it out.
Go here for more info and a demo.