HITACHI CP, NISSHO, AND ALACRITUS BRING VIRTUAL TAPE LIBRARY APPLIANCE TO MARKET.

Storage providers Nissho Electronics and Hitachi CP and Alacritus Software have joined together to bring to market the industry's first virtual tape library appliance; thus setting the bar with the next generation of storage management.

The VTLA Smart Guard product is Generally Available, and recently executives from all three companies will hosted a seminar at the Hilton Tokyo (Shinjuku) hotel.

The virtual tape library technology is used as an intelligent and high-performance front-end cache for physical tape libraries or as a replacement for physical tape libraries. As a replacement, VTLA reduces storage management costs while setting new standards for capacity, performance, price, and reliability.

Specifically, the VTLA consists of Alacritus' Securitus I software installed on an IA based appliance head and Hitachi disk subsystems. Hitachi CP is integrating these three components, with Nissho to resell the VTLA product through its partners and customers. There are two product models customers may choose from: VTLA 1000 for low-end systems, and VTLA 2000 for mid-range systems.

Corporate Hitachi Ltd. is the first organization to implement the mid-range product.

Beta customer Kiyotake Kumazawa, Department Manager, Products Planning Department, Disk Array Systems Division for Hitachi Ltd. commented, "The biggest advantage of VTLA is its ease-of-use. All of our IT operators that are using VTLA agree that VTLA is working seamlessly in their existing environments. Since storage capacities continue to rapidly grow, VTLA is the only existing practical technology that can catch up with the speed of it's growth." Kumazawa continued, "VTLA is truly the `Killer Solution' for coming age of data storage."

According to Ryuichi Ichikawa, Senior Manager, Nissho Electronics Corporation, "This virtual tape library technology lowers administration costs with its simplified backup application configuration and performance tuning making library sharing transparent to the application as well as dynamic tape drive 'sharing' transparent to application. "

Hideo Teramoto, General Manager, TIS Inc. said, "It is widely known among Internet Data Centers and Service Providers that the most complex and difficult service to provide customers is data backup. VTLA suddenly makes it a practical and reasonable service to be deployed. The backup service or operation requires high reliability, high performance, scalability and easy manageability; VTLA brings all of these benefits into the real world. TIS is confident that this solution will be an indispensable element for systems running 24x7. VTLA is truly a disruptive technology." TIS, a subsidiary of Sanwa Bank, is a System Integrator and software developer serving a wide variety of industries and government agencies.

According to Don Trimmer, co-founder and Chief Strategic Officer of Alacritus, "This solution exploits the rapid advances that disk technology is achieving over tape technology, giving customers like Hitachi the necessary support it needs to deal with the out-of-control growth of corporate storage."

Securitus I, the first Alacritus product enables a new class of computer storage called Disk-based Data Protection (DDP), which represents a 'disruptive technology' in the multi-billion dollar tape library marketplace.

Alacritus was founded by the core management team of Intelliguard Software. This team, which has been in the storage software business since 1987, has the demonstrated ability to anticipate market needs, and the proven experience to be first to market.

In addition, the Alacritus has employed the core engineering resources that has created and brought to market such industry advances as Celestra for serverless backup, the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), and Third Party Copy, among many others, such as BudTool, the first backup and restore tool for networked, UNIX-based environments.