Sony – AIT-5 SDX-1100
Sony has always prided itself in innovation and with sticking with a technology even if they’re the only one in the niche. This persistency is clearly seen in the AIT-5 SDX-1100 tape drive. The server market has always been dependent on large capacity tape drives and the AIT-5 is no exception. Built upon the AIT-4 technology, it has a tape capacity of 400GB, double that of an AIT-4, which is really needed in today’s corporate data-warehousing requirements.
The tape-drive fits in the same standard half-height bay as older AIT-4 tape drives. And the AME III (Advanced Metal Evaporated) tape cartridges cost £40 each, which comes to around 10p per gigabyte. This is a relatively cheap media.
This comes bundled with an end-user bundle HP StorStation complete with the mountaing rails compatible with the ProLiant series servers as well as a copy and licence of Symantec’s Backup Exec for Windows. The customer can, of course, use their own (existing) backup and restore solutions, which do cost a bundle.
This would be a good upgrade for those with existing AIT-4 tape drives, as they already have the infrastructure and hardware to support it. Added to this, for backward compatibility, the new drive can read and write to older cartridge models including AIT-3, AIT-3EX and AIT-4 for long term archiving.
The Sony AIT-5 SDX-1100 is a ten year-old product built on a fifty year-old technology, and it is showing its wear. Though it can store up to 400GB per tape, the throughput of 24MB/sec native transfer rate is still the same as its predecessor, the AIT-4. This is mainly because of the Ultra160 SCSI LVD/SE interface. Current SATA-interfaces have faster data throughput.
Increasingly, however, the problem with backup is no longer keeping the data, but in recovering the data from the backup source. This is where tapes are now lagging behind, specially in a multi-server environment. not for small-office/home-office backups, nor for SAN/NAS for medium-sized organizations. The hardware costs as well as the setup and install would only be defrayed in a sufficiently large enterprise with tape archive needs.
For the new user, this is an alternative in a whole slew of tape formats and solutions, as well as a growing market of hard-disk based, online storage, backup and recovery solutions. Sadly, arrayed with hard-disk based solutions which are easy to setup and accessible over a LAN, this is bit more complex.
Tape drives have always been a niche product for archiving and as a backup solution. The use of automated jukebox solutions is being slowly overrun by disk-based solutions using a form of virtual tape library solutions.
In summary, this would appeal to existing customers with an investment in older AIT-4 tape-based hardware, including the Ultra160 SCSI LVD/SE interface. Otherwise, there are existing 500GB to 4TB and 8TB, online real-time disk backup hardware at the same or cheaper price points.
But overall this is not for small-office/home-office backups, nor for SAN/NAS for medium-sized organizations or large enterprises. And definitely not something a new installation would seriously consider.