Features - Storage Innovations:

ADIC SHIPS INNOVATIVE DISK-BASED BACKUP SOLUTION

Advanced Digital Information Corp, a leader in Intelligent Storage solutions for the open systems market, announced that it has begun shipping production units of its integrated disk-to-tape backup solution, the ADIC Pathlight VX.

"We're pleased to be shipping the first product in the industry to improve backup by combining the benefits of disk and tape in a single data protection solution," commented Scott Roza, ADIC vice president of sales and marketing. "With Pathlight VX, backup and restore performance is boosted, RAID reliability is built in, and ownership costs stay low because the complete solution is designed to work transparently with users' existing environments and procedures."

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.

"The Pathlight series is one of the key milestones in our multi-year strategy to develop and acquire core technologies and integrate them into innovative solutions that solve real customer problems," said Peter van Oppen, ADIC chairman and CEO. "Its unique combination of performance, appliance-level integration, and policy-based data movement leverages the technology foundation that also created our StorNext data management software, Pathlight SAN appliances, and our Scalar intelligent tape library solutions."