StorageTek Unveils New Tape Drive

StorageTek today announced limited availability of it’s new T9940B tape drive. The drive, which StorageTek says is the fastest, highest-capacity tape drive available, advances the company’s leadership position as a provider of best-in-class storage devices, enhanced management capabilities and replication solutions.

“Since we laid out the roadmap, our customers have been driving us to bring this product to market. The inherent value it brings to customers is very exciting and allows customers to solve many problems that previously were very expensive or impossible to solve,” said Gary Francis, StorageTek corporate vice president and general manager, Automated Tape Solutions.

“StorageTek’s T9840/T9940 family of tape products has become a de facto industry standard and has propelled StorageTek into the market lead position in this sector. StorageTek continues to drive innovation with the new T9940B and extends its technology leadership and market position,” said Bob Abraham, Freeman Reports president.

“The introduction of the T9940B tape drive demonstrates StorageTek’s commitment to high-performance tape technology,” said Robert Amatruda, research manager at IDC. “StorageTek’s T9940B will address customer challenges of executing reliable back-ups with ever-shrinking back-up windows.”

According to StorageTek, the T9940B is ideal for customers needing to collect, move and store large volumes of critical data with the highest possible reliability. By delivering unmatched data transfer rates, storage capacity, high duty cycle reliability and significantly lowered failure rates, the StorageTek T9940B allows customers to do more work in less time with fewer tape drives while achieving a superior standard of reliability. Ultimately, StorageTek says, the T9940B significantly lowers the total cost of ownership for customers requiring this scope of data protection, by offering the lowest cost-per-gigabyte-stored.

Giovanni Soldi, chairman and co-founder of SHS Multimedia commented, “We work with leading vendors such as StorageTek to integrate tailored digital video archiving solutions that offer real advantages to broadcasters. The latest storage technology found in the T9940B tape drive from StorageTek takes this digital revolution another step forward.”

Francis added, “Our customers demand high-capacity, ultra-reliable and scalable data storage solutions across many operating environments. By offering a wide breadth of flexible storage products and spearheading support from industry-leading ISVs, we are ensuring that our customers can maximize the value of their storage infrastructures while reducing media and labor costs.”

Key features include of the T9940B include:

• Industry-leading speed & capacity: Delivering 30 MB/second native data transfer (up to 252 GB/Hour, compressed) and 200GB(native) /cartridge capacity, the StorageTek T9940B provides unrivaled data movement, storage capacity and protection for today’s data-intensive, high duty-cycle storage environments.
• Enhanced tape drive utilization: A single StorageTek T9940B tape drive can do the work of several mid-range tape drives. The StorageTek T9940B is designed for 70 percent tape motion duty cycles — as close to 7×24 operation as you can get.
• Native 2 gigabit Fibre Channel (FC) interface: Like the fast access T9840B before it, the StorageTek T9940B also features a native 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel interface to enable seamless, high-speed connectivity for storage area network (SAN) environments. Direct native fabric connectivity ensures that customers can leverage the StorageTek T9940B to support their storage area networks without the need for an additional adaptor device.
• Lowest cost per gigabyte: The StorageTek T9940B offers the lowest cost per gigabyte stored at $0.47 per GB, list price. It further reduces customers’ expenses by increasing overall tape storage capacity, ultimately reducing the number of necessary tape mounts, library slots and rack storage space. The StorageTek T9940B is backward read compatible with and uses the same tape cartridge as StorageTek’s first-generation T9940A, protecting customers’ media investments and extending the value and functionality of their StorageTek tape libraries.
• VolSafe technology: The StorageTek T9940B also features StorageTek’s proprietary VolSafe advanced WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) technology designed to support today’s stringent electronic data storage regulatory mandates, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s “non-erasable and non-rewritable” requirements.

The T9940B tape drive will be generally available worldwide in November. The native 2Gb Fibre Channel interface drive has a U.S. list price of $39,500.