Tolis and HighPoint Tape Compatibility Certification Testing for OS X and Linux Platforms

Tolis Group, Inc. and HighPoint Technologies, Inc. announce the completion of development and testing of the HighPoint RocketRAID-272X, 271X and RocketRAID-4500 Series PCIe HBAs (HBA), and the new Thunderbolt-based RocketStor 6328 SAS RAID connectivity solutions with tape drives and libraries from Tolis, HP, IBM, Tandberg Data, Quantum, and others under Linux and Apple OS X systems.

“As more and more computer-based organizations recognize the importance of tape storage for both day to day backup and long-term archival of business assets, the need for connectivity options becomes more and more important,” said Tim Jones, CTO, Tolis. “While HighPoint’s family of RocketRAID and RocketStor RAID adapters have long provided performance, reliability and cost-effectiveness for disk storage for Mac and Linux users, tape devices were not supported on those platforms. Our engineering team has worked with the HighPoint engineers to design, develop and test new drivers and firmware for their SAS-based RAID HBAs. The result is a reliable, cost-effective and high-performance connectivity solution for Linux and Mac users for both disk and tape storage solutions.“

“HighPoint has joined forces with Tolis to bring our highly reliable, high-performance, yet affordable, tape aware Thunderbolt 2 RAID adapter and SAS 6Gb/s PCIe RAID HBAs to the marketplace,” said May Hwang, director product marketing, HighPoint. “Tolis Group’s expert engineering staff, extensive tape technology knowledge base, and comprehensive testing lab, assured that these solutions are capable of supporting all tape technologies, and not limited to a handful of device types or manufacturers. Their BRU I/O engine allowed our Mac and Linux development teams to heavily stress the solutions on OS X platforms, and a variety of Linux systems running both 2.6 and 3.x kernels.“

Tape technologies tested included LTO-4, LTO-5, and LTO-6, DAT72, and DAT320 devices from Tolis, HP, IBM, Quantum, and Tandberg Data, as well as library and automation solutions from Tolis, HP, Quantum, and Tandberg Data. Performance testing of the LTO technologies easily met the native rated performance numbers of 80MB/s to 160MB/s using Tolis’s BRU I/O engine in a real world testing environment involving business data, database files, research data, and media assets ranging from a few 10s of gigabytes to over 140TB. Filesystems tested included HFS+, XFS, ZFS, EXT3/4, NTFS and ExFAT. In addition to general platform compatibility testing, Tolis also tested with their BRU server, BRU producer’s edition, and BRU workstation solutions.

“The most critical factor when dealing with tape devices versus disk arrays connected to a HBA,” continued Jones, “is primarily related to I/O buffering and heat management. While even the highest performance disk I/O is performed in bursts, properly managed I/O to tape is continuous and can very quickly illustrate heat-related operational issues in an I/O subsystem – especially if the disk volume being backed up and the tape device being written to are attached to the same HBA. The HighPoint solutions withstood 100s of terabytes of continuous I/O over many days with no issues.“

Updates for HighPoint PCIe RocketRAID-272X, 271X and RocketRAID-4500 Series HBAs, and Thunderbolt-based RocketStor 6328 SAS adapter are available for download from the HighPoint support site since Oct 23rd, 2014.