Cache-A Archive Appliance Integrated Into Third-Party SAN and NAS

Cache-A Corporation announced that its line of archive appliances is integrated with storage systems from four manufacturers.

These include the NAS solutions from Archion and the SAN solutions from Facilis, Storage Network Solutions and StorNext.

Cache-A recently featured all of its products that integrate with these NAS/SAN solutions – the Pro-Cache5, the high-performance Power-Cache and the quiet, desktop Prime-Cache5 – at the NAB 2012 in Las Vegas, NV.

"Cache-A remains fully committed and focused on our ‘Archiving Made Easy’ approach to improving archiving for today’s digital media professionals," said Mark Ostlund, VP of Sales and Marketing at Cache-A. "This announcement underscores our commitment to not only introducing new products like Power-Cache and embracing new formats like LTFS, but also working closely with other industry leaders to enhance digital workflows."

The SAN/NAS integration enables Cache-A archive appliances to mount directly to those storage platforms and allows end users to pull data directly from them. Previously, a client was needed to see both the Cache-A device and the SAN/NAS. Now, by eliminating the need to tie up another client, faster data transfers are possible, particularly because of GbE rather than FC connectivity.

New Version 2.1 Software Release
In addition to SAN and NAS integration, Cache-A products now feature its latest Version 2.1 software release. Many of these new capabilities were originally included in the new Power-Cache and are now available without charge across the entire product line.

Highlights of these new features include:

Job Queue: The ability to queue jobs from multiple users or events and automatically run jobs in sequence improves productivity in demanding user environments
Status Reporting in the Transfer Summary: New status reporting shows users more information about the progress of file transfers
ASP Protocol: Now offers the ability to directly mount Apple file shares, improving performance in Mac environments
Configuration of Multiple Ethernet Ports: New network configuration controls give users the ability to set up and view the status of each Ethernet port

The Cache-A Product Family
Cache-A’s line of archive appliances offer an integrated networked archiving solution to help increase productivity. They all write data on low-cost, secure, portable, interchangeable and IT LTO-5 tape cartridges that have a 30-year archival life. The latest generation of LTO-5 offers 1.5TB per cartridge, while also providing faster archiving speeds.

The Cache-A product family includes:

Pro-Cache5: An efficient and easily deployed way to manage multiple terabytes of archived data; it offers many of the features demanded for content archiving, interchange and access
Power-Cache Archive Server: Combining Cache-A’s noted appliance functionality with more disk speed and better throughput, it offers a performance blend of LTO-5 tape drives, 8TB of RAID and 10GbE technologies; it offers faster archive and retrieval transfers as well as flexibility for staging content, making duplicate tape copies and working with Cache-A Library and Expansion units
Pro-Cache Library24/Library48 Automation Appliances: Available in either 24 or 48 tape slot configurations, these library options work with Pro-Cache and Power-Cache models to automate cartridge loading for archiving, restoring and even cartridge spanning when archiving large projects; they offer near-line archival capacity of up to 72TB (Library48) or 36TB (Library24)
Prime-Cache5: Optimized for desktop applications and compact, it features an LTO-5 tape drive, 2TB HDD, an improved chassis and 10 times faster direct-attached transfers with USB 3.0

All of these products offer LTFS capability as a free option to standard tar format. Based on open source software, LTFS enables users to interchange content across different operating systems, software applications and physical locations