More on Imation RDX A8 to Be Announced

Imation Corp. already evokes this coming product, not yet officially announced. Here are more information about it.

For SMBs, the Imation RDX A8 can hold eight removable RDX cartridges for a total capacity of up to 8TB online with 1TB cartridge for centralized backup and unlimited offline capacity by removing cartridges. It’s a replacement for low-end tape autoloaders using DDS/DAT, VXA, DAT or LTO-1/2 with better access time and fewer moving parts. It is offered in tabletop or 2U rackmount versions.

The device offers backward and forward compatibility with all RDX cartridges from 160GB to 1TB, based on 2.5-inch HDDs and on a proprietary technology acquired from ProStor by Tandberg Data.

It can operate in two modes:

• tape emulation working as a single drive
• iSCSI JBOD with one GbE port giving a separate drive letter for each cartridge bay (E-L).

Other specs:

• Height: 3.4in / 87mm
• Width: 17.5in / 445mm
• Depth: 12.1in / 307mm
• Weight: 14lb / 6.3kg
• Transfer rate: up to 75MB/s average sustained
• Warranty: one year limited

There is no RAID functionality on several disk drives for better protection. Our idea here is that it’s not convenient to have a disk array with removable media. You have to keep together all the cartridges involved in the same RAID. You cannot remove just one of them but all of them at the same time and it’s better to precisely catalog them because if just one is missing, you cannot recover your data at all. That’s also why tape arrays or RAIT (Redundant Array of Independent Tapes) were unsuccessful even if some companies (Digital Interactive Solutions for example) design them many years ago but gave up their projects. Ultera Systems appears to be the last one to offer RAIT with mirroring and data striping.

The price of the RDX A8 – supposed to be available mid-2011 – is $3,995 in USA without cartridges, lower than a tape autoloader with one tape drive but, as RDX cartridges are more expansive than tape cartridges, total cost will be higher if you consume a lot of disk cartridges. For example BackupWorks.com sells actually 1TB RDX cartridge for $297.

The Imation’s device is very similar to Tandberg Data RDX QuikStation already on the market, a 2U NAS also with 8 RDX cartridges, two GbE ports and configurable as iSCSI storage or as tape emulator.

Imation was studying the possibility to build an automation autoloader for RDX with German manufacturer BDT, a strange idea. Will it ever happen?

You can already look at the RDX A8 on a page of the BackupWorks.com’s Web site.