News
With new storage solution, more is less
- By Jason Turcotte
- July 26, 2006
Who says you can’t have your data and store it, too? A new
solution claims to offer the largest capacity for small and mid-size IT
departments, expanding storage by 50 percent and claiming the lowest
cost-per-gigabyte on the market.
Overland Storage, Inc. released the latest of its entry-level tape
automation solutions with new ARCvault autoloaders and tape libraries
that bring new efficiency to backing-up and archiving data. The
ARCvault 12 autoloader and the ARCvault 24 rack-automized library yields
nearly 20 TB of space at a rate which Overland reps say is up to a 45
percent lower cost-per-gigabyte than its competitors.
And IT professionals are taking the bait.
“Initially, we planned to buy a standalone drive for restoring
tapes at the DR site if needed,” said Billy Vaughn, IT operations
manager, San Jacinto College, Harris County, Texas, who sought a
solution that would extend the institution’s existing backup and
recovery environment with additional protection. “ARCvault made
much more sense because it gave us the opportunity to take advantage of
tape automation while obtaining 12 times the capacity of a standalone
drive at a similar price point.”
More companies are looking for new data protection options that
include both disk and tape solutions but the penny-pinching process
often proves too costly. According to Brian Garrett, analyst for
Enterprise Strategy Group, ARCvault’s affordability lets IT
management invest in the best of both worlds.
The ARCvault is said to offer easy-to-install functions and
management options. Its features include:
- Compact 2u form factor, reducing need for rack space
- Support for LTO-2 and LTO-3 tape drives
- Removable 12-cartridge mags for off-site storage
- Barcode support for media management
- Replaceable components, limiting costs
- Remote management for control, troubleshooting
functions
ARCvault 12 offers up to 9.6 TB of capacity and ARCvault 24 provides up to 19.2 TB. Both allow
users to upgrade vaults to a higher capacity, next-generation tape
drives, as their data grows. Both solutions start around $5,000 and are
available now.
About the Author
Jason Turcotte is an assistant editor at Application Development Trends. He can be reached at [email protected].