Certance LLC is now shipping magnetic media protection technologies in its DAT72 tapes and will ship a new entry-level autoloader by the end of this year, officials said Tuesday.
Digital Audio Tape 72 is the recently launched fifth generation of the popular Digital Data Storage format, which will now be more reliable than past generations.
“What weve done is gone beyond what the specification asks for and put [in] a set of error recovery algorithms,” said Mike Lakowicz, vice president of product strategy and business development, in Costa Mesa, Calif.
The new technology, called SmartShield, lets drives attempt to rebuild corrupted data tracks by breaking down the remaining non-corrupt data into increasingly smaller parts, instead of just posting an error message if a minimum amount of usable data isnt immediately available, he explained.
DAT72 drives cost about $1,000. But especially in smaller companies, “we dont know where a tape has been or where it has come from,” he noted. In smaller organizations, there likely arent dust-free data rooms, administrators may be less qualified, and drives are more likely to be acquired from used equipment brokers.
Seperately, “Were looking to take a DAT72 into our small form factor,” Lakowicz said. That will be a six-tape autoloader, pre-configured in a 1U rack model, he said. That will be announced next week but wont ship until September, he said.
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