Gateway Inc. on Wednesday will launch several entry-level tape autoloaders. Later this year, the company will announce storage management software, officials said on Tuesday.
The new products follow on the heels of an August announcement, when the Poway, Calif. company re-entered the enterprise storage space, after a brief 2001 network-attached storage offering.
The new Gateway 810 External Autoloader, made by Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Certance LLC (formerly Seagate), is 2U tall and holds six Digital Audio Tape 72 cartridges, said Tim Diefenthaler, director of enterprise server and storage. Its list price is $2,499, with a second loader costing $1,499, which would bring the librarys raw, uncompressed capacity to 864GB, he noted.
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Also new are Gateways $1,499 DAT72 Internal Autoloader, with a maximum uncompressed capacity of 432GB; and an internal stand-alone DAT72 drive for $899. "Now if you have a tower system, we have the ability to automate your backup internally," Diefenthaler said.
All three of the new tape products are available now.
The company will also offer management software for its storage lines. "We certainly have plans to offer storage management software in the future. Well be integrating that with our systems," Diefenthaler said, adding that details will come by the end of this year.
In addition, Gateway is also preparing for higher-end products using the Linear Tape-Open 2 format, versus its current high-end use of standard LTO. But LTO-2 tapes cost about $120, he noted, so "when we can get [costs] down into half of that [amount], thats when well be interested," he explained. He said that could take about a year.
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