ATTO announces virtual tape appliance which uses existing storage

Date: 28 August 2006
(ICT World)
ATTO has released the FastStream VT 5300, a high-performance, standalone virtual tape appliance that is designed to seamlessly integrate into existing back-up environments to fully emulate existing tape libraries.

According to the company, the FastStream VT 5300 allows the use of existing storage, for example JBOD or RAID Arrays, to create virtual tape libraries.

This is intended to allow for fast, error-free back-up and restore of all critical data. The FastStream VT is also designed to add hardware-based Raid parity protection to back-up data while maintaining or improving performance.

"The ATTO FastStream VT 5300 provides immediate business benefits. Administrators can simply attach the FastStream VT into an existing bac-kup infrastructure using the same back-up application packages and instantly gain greater performance from back-up and restore operations," states Ed Tierney, director of marketing at ATTO Technology.

Specifically designed to perform concurrent backups to disk-based virtual tape, a single FastStream VT 5300 can back-up and restore up to 60 concurrent streams of data allowing multiple server back-ups, he adds. ATTOs exclusive Advanced VTL Capacity Expansion (AVCE) technology is designed to allow virtual tapes to be added as needed.

With two 4Gbps Fibre Channel host interface ports, and two Ultra320 SCSI drive interfaces, and designed in a slim 1U 19" rack form factor, the FastStream VT 5300 aims to enable direct attached SCSI storage to act as a conventional tape library.

According to ATTO, the FastStream VT 5300 enables disk storage to emulate customers tape libraries delivering the performance, reliability, and availability benefits of disk-based back-up while letting customers maintain existing software and tape back-up procedures.