The Answer to the Tape Library Dilemma

The importance of being able to connect to SAS tape libraries over a dedicated Ethernet connection cannot be overstated. While SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) tape drives are a smart, economical choice, they are limited by their point-to-point design.

For example, trying to backup multiple servers through a single SAS tape library creates a snowball effect of compromises like adding additional network-attached storage (NAS) to cache the day’s activity before transferring to tape. If that works correctly, there’s still the matter of the NAS hardware supporting backups to tape and the need to manage the amount of data stored on the NAS.

That’s just one example of a compromise. There are many more – including the dreaded sneakernet approach!

With an ATTO XstreamCORE® ET 8200 intelligent Bridge, there are no compromises. You can share SAS tape libraries via a dedicated Ethernet connection with a single XstreamCORE ET 8200 and gain speed and flexibility well beyond what a server, NAS or sneakernet can provide.

What Does XstreamCORE Do? It provides for the remote location of tape libraries over 40Gb Ethernet. It increases the speed and efficiency of the archive process. And it remotely connects up to 64 servers to 16 tape drives up to 30 miles away.

ATTO XstreamCORE ET 8200 utilizes multiple parallel I/O acceleration engines working together to move data at an extremely fast rate. Using the lossless RDMA Ethernet protocol iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) and hardware-accelerated iSCSI, XstreamCORE ET 8200 integrates with SAS storage to create high-performance shared Ethernet storage solutions.

XstreamCORE ET 8200 is easy to set up and use, frees up space, and delivers better throughput performance than native SAS thanks to exclusive ATTO SpeedWrite™ technology.

ATTO SpeedWrite keeps paths between attached hosts and XstreamCORE ET 8200 filled with data to significantly boost write performance to SAS tape libraries. Multiple hosts can each communicate to different tape drives while all hosts benefit from the early response mechanism built into SpeedWrite. The result is that tape performance is boosted by up to 30 percent over direct connect SAS tape drives.