SM Data Rolls Out StoreData Sharc Lite

SM Data, a Spanish storage distributor, introduces StoreData SHARC Lite, a solution that allows an important segment of users that couldn’t afford a robotized archival solution to create a low-cost tape archive.

It consists of a desktop LTO-4 (800 GB native) or LTO-5 (1.500 GB native) unit and an archival software application connected to a Windows 7 workstation that creates a volume that behaves like a hard disk.

Archiving a file is as simple as drag and drop or copy and paste the file to the StoreData SHARC Lite icon using Windows Explorer. Once the file is archived it appears on the unit directory. When the tape is full, the user inserts a second tape to allow more files to be archived. This process can go on indefinitely.

As the volume created behaves like a disk, it maintains the folder and file structure for all tapes that have been archived even for the offline tapes. Should the user need to recover a file that is stored on an offline tape, the system will prompt the user with the name of the tape that contains the required file.

Tape format is tar POSIX, a format supported by Linux, Unix and by most of backup software applications as well.

If the size of the archive grows to a point that the application requires a quick and automated way to recover the files, the tapes created with StoreData SHARC Lite can be used on a StoreData SHARC, a more powerful archival system that includes a tape library because both systems utilize the same format and the same database.