Internet specialist and service provider, M-Web, has acted to secure its own corporate data as well as that of its clients by purchasing the first two new Specra Logic 10 000 tape libraries sold in South Africa. According to M-Web IT manager, Johan Potgieter, the decision to go with Spectra Logic came down to a simple issue - growth path forward. "No company enjoying the sustained expansion we are, can afford to choose information systems that do not provide a similar growth path," he says. M-Web embarked upon an extensive evaluation process before making its decision. "We investigated a number of possible solutions but most were clumsy, possessed large footprints, and were based upon mature technology with no significant growth path," he reports. Admitting he stumbled on the technology almost by accident, Potgieter says his team didn`t take it seriously at first. He explains, "We were evaluating large, floor-to-ceiling tape silos when Peter Wilson a director of Intelligent Systems (IS), walked in with a Spectra Logic library tucked under his arm!" The M-Web team stopped laughing when Wilson plugged it in and demonstrated the capacity and performance capabilities of the unit. "Spectra Logic`s 10000 Series is based on Sony`s new Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT) technology," says Wilson, "which can currently offer as much as 65GB capacity [with compression] on a single three-and-a-half-inch tape cartridge. From a performance standpoint, AIT offers data transfer rates of over 7MB/second." The AIT media also incorporates a 16k memory chip which provides the drive with a comprehensive catalogue of the tape half a second after the cartridge has been inserted. "This makes it possible to seek to and restore data as much as four times faster than with other technologies," adds Wilson. Since a Spectra Logic subsystem can accommodate up to 40 tape cartridges, the aggregate capacity of a single library could reach as high as 2,6 terabytes (TB) - in a drawer hardly larger than the average PC tower server. With each drawer able to hold up to four AIT drives, the performance issues normally associated with adding tape cartridges to a library can be addressed. In its first iteration, the technology satisfies M-Web`s requirement for future growth through Sony`s road-map to double both capacity and performance twice before the new millennium. "Plans to exceed 200GB on a single cartridge in 2000 are far in excess of what any other vendor was prepared to commit to," says Potgieter. Exemplary of M-Web`s potential to exploit this planned upgrade path is the company`s growth since acquiring its Spectra Logic libraries. "We initially ordered two systems containing a total of 40 tapes and within two months had to order another 20 cartridges," explains Potgieter. Speed of installation was another plus factor. M-Web`s technical manager, Edell Burger, says, "It took less than an hour to install the hardware and a day or so to configure the [Alexandria] software to meet our specific backup strategy requirements." . Performance too, is an issue high on M-Web`s agenda and Burger says the company no longer faces the issue of an inadequate overnight backup window. "For our recent Cape Town move, we secured 40GB of information in under three hours," she says. Wilson confirms this, saying that a fully-populated (four tape drive) Spectra Logic library is capable of sustaining backup throughput of more than 110GB per hour. Impressive performance and capacities aside, he says another telling attribute of the technology is the Alexandria software associated with it. "The window-like graphic display offers an easy, intuitive means of controlling the media, robotics and tape drives," he says. "It also provides real-time monitoring of the library and built-in diagnostics offer warning of fault conditions." On the subject of field maintenance Wilson praises the modular design of Spectra Logic tape libraries - which he says ensures minimum downtime from hardware or media failure. "It takes less that ten minutes to swap out a faulty drive and the barcode scanning capability takes the headaches out of tape library management while also enabling the software to skip over a faulty tape until it can be replaced." This same modularity of design provides the investment protection required of computer systems and software in the rapidly changing world of information technology, according to Wilson. "Each draw is field upgradeable to 40 cartridges and four tape drives," he says. "And, if this should prove insufficient, it can be incorporated into a tape frame with capacity for up to eight draws - offering the potential to backup over 20 TB of data in a single floor-standing cabinet no bigger than a small cupboard." Potgieter has the last word: "We needed a fast and reliable backup solution capable of handling huge - and growing - volumes of data. Spectra Logic was the only answer."
Share
Editorial contacts