Adic expands Pathlight VX disk-to-tape solutions.

Advanced Digital Information Corporation (Nasdaq:ADIC), supplier of intelligent storage solutions for the open system market, announced recently an expansion of its Pathlight VX disk-to-tape backup solution that will bring the benefits of disk performance, RAID fault tolerance, and an integrated path to tape to a larger community of IT end users. In this release, Pathlight VX increases its industry-leading performance to 2.0 TB/hour, adds features to increase flexibility in how data is stored on disk and written to tape, offers extended RAS capabilities, and integrates EMC CLARiiON storage into the product.

To give IT organizations with smaller storage needs a practical way to easily add disk to their existing backup system, Pathlight VX now offers a new 3.8 TB entry point--less than half the capacity of the original 10 TB starting capacity. And at the upper end of the capacity range, Pathlight VX increases the maximum disk-based storage capacity from 40 TB to 46.8 TB. Performance between host and disk and between disk and tape has also been increased in the new release to a full 2.0 TB/hour, an increase of 67%.

"Pathlight VX solutions double backup and restore speeds over conventional backup systems, provide a high performance off-line automated path to tape, and integrate easily into existing environments without requiring new software or processes," said Scott Roza, ADIC vice president of Sales and Marketing. "Our new release extends those powerful business benefits both to the mid-range and to very large enterprise environments using EMC CLARiiON storage for high performance and reliability. With Pathlight VX, IT departments that manage from a few hundred gigabytes of data to many terabytes can now take advantage of a fully integrated disk-to-tape backup system."

The new Pathlight VX has expanded its list of data management policies to include background writing of data from disk to tape transparent to backup applications ("Early Tape Creation"). With the new policies, customers can use Pathlight VX's internal data movers to automatically create redundant backup sets in the tape library for an additional level of data protection and faster media export. On the RAS front, the new Pathlight VX now includes full dual controller RAID options and enhanced system health checks. The new features mean improved protection, streamlined operation, and a more resilient architecture.

"Pathlight VX offers a powerful and simple solution for users who want to add disk to their backup system while maintaining tape for disaster recovery," said W. Curtis Preston, President and CEO, The Storage Group. "It makes it easy to integrate the two storage technologies into a single integrated system with the best characteristics of each. Just as important, it provides a high performance path to tape that eliminates any negative impact on other applications or on network traffic."

Pathlight VX gives enterprise IT departments disk performance and RAID reliability without requiring changes in how they backup, restore, and preserve their data. With Pathlight VX, backup and recovery times are reduced through a combination of random file access and the elimination of media loading. Because it supports automated export of standard format backup tapes, Pathlight VX provides these performance gains while it retains all of the advantages of traditional tape backup, including long term data security, low cost scalability, and portability.

With Pathlight VX, organizations can eliminate the problem of expanding data and shrinking backup windows by shifting the time when they write tapes. In the new model, data is written rapidly to the Pathlight VX disk array during the normal backup window. Then, during the rest of the day, the data is moved to the tape library in the background using an internal data mover and isolated connections to avoid slowing down application servers or increasing network traffic. Control for the integrated system is provided through the same backup software used to manage conventional tape library architectures, so the increased performance and fault tolerance is provided without requiring users to change their existing backup procedures or applications.