Infinistore: Better By Design.Ordinarily, I don't expect to see outstanding tape announcements at the bustling AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management International, Silver Spring, MD, www.aiim.org) A membership organization founded in 1943 devoted to creating industry standards and disseminating information about the document management industry. show in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , but I came across one of the best designed tape libraries that I've seen in a long time at AIIM, from a brand new source. Some of you might remember Herbert Grau, one of the leading lights of automation engineering at EMASS, before its sale to ADIC. Herbert's non-compete agreement has expired and he showed his newest brainchild at AIIM: the Infinistore tape library from Grau Data Storage. Infinistore offers a capacity scalable from 10TB to 50TB. The innovative robotics allow the library to process cartridges in up to 16 tape drives simultaneously without significant impact on the operation. It upgrades to become a virtual disk NAS (1) See network access server. (2) (Network Attached Storage) A specialized file server that connects to the network. A NAS device contains a slimmed-down operating system and a file system and processes only I/O requests by supporting the popular system. One of the real eye-openers and the capability that impressed me the most is the access rate: 350 tape exchanges per hour in the library and 700 per hour in the virtual disk system. Operation is from either a display panel on the library or a Java-based remote management console A terminal or workstation used to monitor and control a network. See Microsoft Management Console. . Herbert tells me that the Infinistore is SAN-ready with an optional Fibre Channel module connecting the library and tape drives to a SAN. Up to eight FC connections are available. A best case performance would have a bandwidth ranging from 100MB/sec to 800MB/sec. The library can be populated pop·u·late tr.v. pop·u·lat·ed, pop·u·lat·ing, pop·u·lates 1. To supply with inhabitants, as by colonization; people. 2. by either Sony's AIT-2 drives or by the Exabyte Mammoth 2 and, while AIT and Mammoth drives are supported by major backup software See backup program. (tool, software) backup software - Software for doing a backup, often included as part of the operating system. Backup software should provide ways to specify what files get backed up and to where. , Infinistore assures compatibility by providing emulation options that support many of the older libraries on the market. Between the robotics, a system platform with integrated rack space, and an eye-pleasing industrial design, the Grau Infinistore was the height of AIIM for me. It should be the height of performance for you. |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion