Cache-A Archive Appliance With LTO-5

Cache-A Corp. introduced Pro-Cache5, an archive appliance for digital film, broadcast and video professionals working with file-based workflows. One of the first LTO-5 archive products on the market, Pro-Cache5 takes advantage of this next generation technology to offer nearly double the storage capacity of existing LTO-4 cartridges – now 1.5 terabytes/LTO-5 cartridge – while also providing significantly faster archiving speeds.

Cache-A is featuring Pro-Cache5 at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB 2010) at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV, April 12-15.

“Pro-Cache5 offers the most advanced tape-based storage technology and defines a new category of archive appliances,” said Phil Ritti, President and CEO of Cache-A Corporation. “Pro-Cache5 offers many of the advanced on-set and in-studio features demanded by today’s media industry professionals for content archiving, interchange and access. At the same time, it offers the most cost-effective way to manage multiple terabytes of archived data in a professional media environment.”

Building on the acclaimed and highly adaptable Pro-Cache platform, the small form factor Pro-Cache5 enables creative professionals to create source masters in acquisition workflows when using the new memory card or disk-based cameras. At the same time, it also provides long-term archival storage with easy access to content assets at every stage of production.

Leveraging the technical innovations of LTO-5, Pro-Cache5 further extends data tape’s key role in ensuring long-term content retention, archiving and disaster recovery. Pro-Cache5 writes data on low-cost, secure, portable, interchangeable and IT industry-standard LTO-5 tape cartridges using the standard ‘tar’ format, and the archive life is 30 years. LTO-5 offers read/write compatibility with LTO-4 to ensure a truly future-proof solution that protects investments, eases implementation and permits source master content to be accessed over a long period of time.

The Pro-Cache Platform
Based on the upgradeable and expandable Pro-Cache platform, both the LTO-5 based Pro-Cache5 and LTO-4 based Pro-Cache4 network-attached archive appliances are easy to install and use. Operating system-independent, they can be deployed into Windows, MacOS and Unix environments to provide direct access to archived data from any platform with simultaneous multi-user access and volume sharing.  

Both the rack-mountable Pro-Cache5 and Pro-Cache4 offer an internal 4TB of RAID configurable as either striped for maximum speed (RAID 0) or for data redundancy with mirrored reliability (RAID 1). With additional ExpressCard and eSATA connections, the Pro-Cache platform is ideal for the fast archiving of direct connected storage.  It also offers SAS connections for high-speed mounts and expansion as well as a sturdy three rack unit (3RU)/half rack chassis for industrial compatibility.

In addition, the Pro-Cache platform can be upgraded to control robotic libraries. With a library upgrade, users can archive across multiple cartridges automatically and retrieve content over the network without manual intervention. With dozens of cartridges automatically accessible in the library, Pro-Cache can still manage more than 100TB of shelf-stored content.