This apparently is New Product Week in the data storage business. Spectra Logic on Aug. 25 joined EMC/Dell, IBM/LSI and NetApp in unveiling new systems for the midrange market, by far the fast-growing segment of the IT.
Each of the new releases offers a slightly different feature set, connectivity options and service-level choices. And not all of them are disk-based.
Boulder, Colo.-based Spectra Logic, which sells advanced tape-based storage appliances to midmarket and small to medium-size businesses, introduced what it claims is the industry’s first fully integrated tape system offering deduplication, remote site replication and automated migration of data.
The company’s nTier Deduplication appliance is where this all happens, Molly Rector, Spectra Logic’s vice president of product management and marketing, told eWEEK.
“As we developed nTier Deduplication, we collected customer feedback and recognized an opportunity to streamline data replication to tape,” Rector said. “nTier Deduplication enables customers to optimize tiered storage environments across multiple sites.”
IT administrators are continually challenged to protect everything, said John Webster, senior analyst at Illuminata.
“The integration and policy-based automation of deduplication with other data protection processes available with nTier Deduplication help IT administrators more easily and quickly meet their growing data protection obligations,” Webster said.
Rector said that Spectra Logic’s nTier Deduplication appliances run at speeds up to 900MB per second and are compatible with backup software applications that include Symantec Backup Exec and NetBackup, CommVault Simpana, CA ArcServe, HP Data Protector and SyncSort Backup Express.
nTier Deduplication is available now. Pricing for an nTier500 v80 Deduplication appliance starts at $23,500, Rector said.
Enterprise-type Features in New BlueScale Release
Spectra Logic also launched its BlueScale 10.6 tape system on Aug. 25. The new product offers high-availability enterprise features that were previously only available on disk.
BlueScale 10.6 integrates directly into existing Spectra T-Series libraries and delivers the first “hot spare” drive available for tape libraries, Rector told eWEEK.
“Our goal is to deliver ‘tape without pain’ to the data protection market,” Rector said. “Tape is a good, solid business for us, and you can’t beat the green IT benefits it brings to a data center.”
BlueScale 10.6 offers some features that weren’t available in the midrange tape genre in the past: proactive notification of potential hardware failure with Hardware Lifecycle Management (HLM) and auto-discovery of new media through its Media Lifecycle Management (MLM), Rector said.
“The intelligent remote management capabilities allow users to monitor the health of media and hardware, to put an end to unscheduled site visits, and thus reduce costs,” Rector said.
BlueScale 10.6 is available on the T-Series tape library product line, which includes the Spectra T50e, T120, T200, T380, T680 and T950 libraries. T-Series libraries contain 10 to 10,050 tape media slots.
BlueScale 10.6 is available as a free upgrade to existing customers with current support contracts.
For more information on both products, go here.