CMS, a division of MGX Holdings and South African StorageTek distributor, has announced the availability of StorageTek`s new 9738 automated tape library, bringing the power of StorageTek`s hallmark storage "silos" out of the data centre to give workgroups powerful, low-cost data storage. The 9738 puts StorageTek`s fast-access tape drives and robotic library system within reach of workgroups and small to mid-size businesses. The system will also create the opportunity for customers to use tape drives - instead of expensive disk - to manage the fast-growing, data-intensive needs of key applications.
StorageTek`s 9738 tape library includes StorageTek`s 9840 tape drives, combining automated storage management and mainframe-class reliability with faster data access at one-fifth the cost of comparable optical systems.
With corporate data volumes spiralling at the workgroup and department levels, companies are faced with limited short-term choices that impose either capacity or speed trade-offs. By comparison, the 9738 library delivers higher throughput while lowering storage media costs by 75% over comparable optical storage systems.
Because automated tape storage solutions were initially built for mainframe environments, they have been too large and expensive for departmental needs.
As a stopgap measure to address the shortfall of small-scale, automated tape libraries, vendors have introduced simple, single-drive "stacker-loader" systems. These devices can only access data serially, posing data retrieval bottlenecks, and capacity and performance limitations. Armed with 9840 drives, StorageTek`s 9738 automated tape solution can conduct random retrievals, giving users faster access to application data and much-improved capacity.
Optical systems such as CD jukeboxes, another midrange storage solution, do not scale well and prove to be cost-inefficient as departmental applications continue to grow. In addition to higher sustained throughput, 9840-enabled libraries lower storage costs by 75% or more over optical solutions, and provide investment protection as customers upgrade their systems.
Reliable, automated solutions such as the 9738 also fit well into shared, mixed-platform storage environments, such as storage area networks (SANs). With SANs, customers are moving storage traffic off their traditional front-end LAN networks to dedicated, scalable storage networks that can be shared by many servers. High-performance, 9840-enabled libraries support the frequent data access demanded by these SAN environments within departments and throughout the enterprise.
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