New compatibility between Exabyte and Raidtec products promise high-performance integrated backup capabilities for Raidtec's NAS server appliances.

by Wayne Kawamoto [February 21, 2002]

Exabyte Corporation, a provider of network backup systems, and Raidtec Corporation, a provider of NAS and SAN storage networking systems, announced compatibility between Raidtec's SNAZ R6 and RAIDserver and Exabyte's M2 and VXA-1 tape drives.

The SNAZ R6 is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server appliance that is designed to help IT departments add immediate storage to their LANs in a simple, economical, non-disruptive way, as well as expand into SAN storage as required.

The SNAZ R6 serves up to 430 GB of local hot swap RAID-protected storage. Raidtec says that its SNAZ R6 RAIDserver is a high performance direct NAS file server appliance that's ideally suited for ISP, Inter/Intranet, E-commerce, Web Filer, Departmental Server, and virtually any Distributed File or Data Sharing Application.

According to Exabyte, the M2 tape drive is the fastest in its class and delivers a 30 MB per second compressed transfer rate and a capacity of up to 150 GB (60 GB native, implying a compression ratio of 2.5:1).

The drive is designed for UNIX, NT and LINUX environments, and should automatically scale its performance to match the host system, without impacting server efficiency. The self-cleaning tape drive comes with conditioning heads and a dynamic cleaning wheel.

At 33 GB native, the VXA-1 tape drive offers good capacity for multi-gigabyte workstations or network servers and transfers data at 3 MB/sec. The drive offers hardware compression, error correction, and read-after-write; comes with SCSI, FireWire, or IDE interfaces; and supports Windows, Linux, MacOS, Novell Netware, and most flavors of Unix as well as backup applications that include ARCserve, Backup Exec, Retrospect, and others.

According to the companies, compatibility with the M2 and VXA-1 should give users of Raidtec's NAS server appliances high-performance integrated backup devices. The companies say that either backup solution dramatically reduces saturation and throughput restrictions over a LAN.

"Exabyte tape drives compliment Raidtec's price/performance leadership in the SAN and NAS storage markets," said Raidtec CTO Noel May. "Our customers now have access to the performance benefits offered by MammothTape and the value and reliability advantages offered by VXA tape technology,"

"The combination of Raidtec's NAS functionality with our tape storage capabilities also allows users to increase storage over their networks while reducing the impact to servers during the backup process." said Exabyte President and CEO Bill Marriner. "The performance, reliability and value of Exabyte's drives are a perfect match for Raidtec's NAS appliances."

Availability and pricing
The VXA-1 internal SCSI drive is priced at $899, while the Mammoth-2 internal SCSI drive is priced at $4,895.

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