Features - Storage Innovations:

NEARTEK, TSI ANNOUNCE AVAILABILITY OF TAPE STORAGE SOLUTION

Neartek Inc, a leading provider of tape storage software solutions for multi-platform computing environments, and Tributary Systems Inc (TSI) announced that TSI's Virtual Tape Solution (VTS) powered by Neartek's Virtual Storage Engine (VSE2) tape virtualization software will be offered by Hewlett-Packard's NonStop Enterprise Division for the HP NonStop server platform. VTS is a turnkey solution delivered on an all-HP hardware platform designed specifically for HP NonStop customers.

HP customers with high-availability, transaction intensive environments and existing tape storage infrastructure can improve tape capacity, performance and fault tolerance for backup, restore, archiving and Transaction Management Facility audit trail operations with VTS. VTS reduces NonStop data center operating expenses by reducing tape hardware and maintenance costs through storage consolidation; reducing media costs and associated off-site storage costs; reducing operator intervention and operational overhead; saving time through performance improvements; and providing access to newer, more efficient tape technologies.

"HP's Nonstop Enterprise Division's decision to standardize on VTS is tremendous validation for our VSE2 solution," said Jon Greene, senior product manager at Neartek. "Our software delivers a clear, immediate ROI for companies, such as HP customers with mainframes and midrange systems, who need to consolidate their tape operations to minimize infrastructure and media costs, while simplifying the overall management of their backup processes. We'll continue to work with leading solution providers such as TSI who will help us to further penetrate the top platform vendors."

"Our customers are Fortune 100 companies, including leading financial institutions, using HP NonStop for mission critical eBusinesss applications," said Shawn Sabanayagam, vice president of strategy, sales and marketing at TSI. "Typically, they require a reliable, fault-tolerant, and high-performance solution for backup and recovery. Our virtual tape solution meets these requirements and enables tape storage consolidation to improve backup efficiencies, and most importantly, reduce costs."

Neartek's tape virtualization solution excels in consolidating tape infrastructure and reducing tape costs in data intensive, heterogeneous IT environments. It's designed to provide a single point of control for managing tape operations across heterogeneous hosts, storage devices and backup software applications. Unlike proprietary systems or disk-only storage solutions, VSE2 maximizes existing tape storage investments by offering seamless interoperability among storage devices, backup applications and operating systems.

Neartek's VSE2 software is not only proven in HP NonStop environments, but is also a powerful tape consolidation solution for many platforms, including HP e3000, HP 9000 and HP Integrity servers. VSE2 is compatible with HP OpenView OmniBack, as well as HP libraries based on DLT, Super DLT, LTO and 9840 tape technologies.