ADIC Lights the Way With Pathlight

Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC) has updated its Pathlight VX disk backup solution to offer more performance and scalability for less.

ADIC claims that Pathlight VX 2.0 is the first open system backup product to combine the capacity and characteristics of disk and tape in a single, unified system, using policy-based data management technology to provide total system capacity of almost 3,000 terabytes.

The combined system fits into existing backup environments, presenting itself to applications as a virtual tape library that transparently includes disk elements for high performance and RAID fault tolerance and tape elements for low-cost capacity and disaster recovery.

“ADIC is advancing disk backup into an important new phase by combining the characteristics of disk and tape in an integrated system,” Dianne McAdam, senior analyst and partner at Data Mobility Group, said. “Disk has great attributes for some parts of backup, but tape is a requirement, too, not only for compliance with retention regulations, but simply for economical scale. In standard enterprise capacity ranges, the cost of tape storage will remain several times lower than disk for the foreseeable future. ADIC’s approach toward combining the two technologies gives users the best characteristics of both.”

ADIC says Pathlight VX 2.0’s approach lets customers backup and restore critical data at twice the speed of conventional backup systems. Policy-based management enables what the company claims is another first: automated life cycle management for backup data, including the ability to create multiple copies on different media types.

Pathlight VX 2.0 provides throughput up to 2 TB/hour. Disk storage elements range from 3.8 to 46.8 TB capacity. Tape storage is provided by integrating ADIC Scalar and StorageTek L-Series libraries. Single-library configurations can reach 2,823 TB native capacity — 5,599 TB with normal compression. For compliance with long-term data retention and disaster recovery requirements, Pathlight responds to backup software commands by exporting application-readable media that can be restored in any standard tape drive or library.

Data management policies in the 2.0 release include the capability to retain key data on disk for faster recovery of historical information, automated creation of up to four copies of data for redundant protection, and retention of local copies of data after a copy has been exported.

ADIC corporate marketing manager Steve Whitner says costs for Pathlight VX 2.0 range from $15 a gigabyte for a 45 TB solution, depending on the disk and tape configuration, to as low as $2 a gigabyte for a very large solution.

A 43.8 TB solution that includes 3.8 TB of disk and a Scalar 1200 library would cost $261,583, or about $6 a gigabyte, including media and two years of onsite service.

Pathlight VX 2.0 will be available January 2005.

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