Cache-A Shows LTO Archiving Innovations

Cache-A Corporation, manufacturer of LTO archiving appliances, will showcase the latest innovations in LTO-tape archiving that support enhanced productivity and deliver greater levels of asset protection, at the 2014 HPA Tech Retreat, Feb 17-21, Indian Wells, CA.

Cache-A 10GbE Pro-Cache610 with Sidecar

Highlights include:

• enhanced interchange and delivery capabilities;
• Pro-Cache610http://cache-a.com/products/pro-cache/, a turbo-charged version of the company’s Pro-Cache6 LTO-6 archive appliance;
• and Simul-Copy, Cache-A’s fast LTO-tape duplication and verification capability.

“We see more and more media and entertainment content being delivered and interchanged on LTO tape,” said Tom Goldberg, Cache-A VP of product development. “Cache-A’s response has been to develop new products and features that support faster ingest and archiving, but without adding any additional strain on storage and networking resources. These advances ultimately help users to efficiently and transparently exchange large amounts of data. We welcome the chance to share these new capabilities at the HPA Retreat.“

Appliances meet the media and entertainment industry need to safeguard increasing volumes of priceless assets at minimal cost, while delivering tools and performance for reliable, future-proof archiving. They can be deployed in a variety of professional digital media workflows – from on-set cart systems to SAN and NAS storage systems in post-production.

Enhanced Interchange and Delivery:
The company is focusing on efficient ‘hub and spoke’ delivery models, where remote content creators are providing delivery to larger central data repositories. Based on collaborative work with Discovery Channel, the appliances can now format LTFS tapes to meet all of Discovery’s delivery specifications. This includes automatically placing metadata.xml files in the index partition and automatically building MD5 checksum files for graphics, audio and program content. The metadata file can be restored later, slashing access time for that information. Custom policies allow users to specify their own files for this special treatment.

Cache-A is working with Crossroads Systems, Inc.www.crossroads.com to offer users the option to utilize the Strongbox Seed Format when recording LTFS formatted data. With this capability tapes generated by Cache-A appliances can be ingested into a Strongbox environment without the need to actually read the data on the LTFS tape. This concept enables users to archive locally and feed tapes to a centralized archive center in a very efficient workflow.

Pro-Cache610:
Turbo-charged Pro-Cache610 has been developed in response to the advent of low-cost, 10GbE infrastructure technology, and the media and entertainment industry demand to take advantage of the productivity 10GbE delivers.

It is based on Pro-Cache6 appliance, and features dual RJ-45 connections for 10GbE I/O, allowing archiving at over 150MB/s. It also has eSATA ports for fast access to DAS, and a SAS connection allowing connectivity to Cache-A LTO-6 library or sidecar expansion units, as well as third-party robotic systems.

Pro-Cache610 comes with 6TB internal HDD RAID-0 or RAID-1 disk-cache storage, while LTO-6 cartridges can hold up to 2.5TB of data natively. It is rack-mountable in a central machine room, but can also be deployed in on-set cart systems, and is suited to archiving operations where massive amounts of data are generated every day.

Simul-Copy – fast, simultaneous LTO-tape duplication:
Simul-Copy capability improves archiving workflow by speeding-up the delivery of LTO-tape copies for production, post production, working archive and offsite DR. It is helpful on longform projects that can produce several terabytes of RAW camera data every day.

It enables users to simultaneously make multiple tar or LTFS LTO-tapes copies, rather than sequential copies, at close to the same speed as a single copy. It works with Cache-A’s LTO-4, LTO-5 and latest LTO-6 generation appliances.

Source content, on network-attached volumes (SAN/NAS), DAS devices, or Cache-A’s own RAID, needs to be only read once to be written to multiple tapes simultaneously. This has the added advantage of reducing wear and tear on disk systems and avoids strain on network resources. Using Simul-Copy, Power-Cache systems can create up to four simultaneous LTO-tape copies, while Pro-Cache models can create two simultaneous LTO-tape copies. These copy drives can be in Cache-A’s Library24 and Library48 accessories, in rackmount expansion chassis, or in Cache-A’s newly released LTO-Sidecar expansion drive.