History 2005: Tape Appliance from Start-Up Index Engines

The main originality of the library, with its new robotics, is a pass-thru system that allows for the automatic transfer of cartridges from one unit to a 2nd, placed above the 1st, to arrive at a 36U unit with twice the capacity, up to 161TB.

SCSI and FC interfaces are offered, with iSCSI arriving by the end of the year.

Other models of the library will be permutated on the new platform, to be available next September, according to Gramar Hunt, EMEA product manager.

A sample price: $70,000 for configuration with 5 SDLT60 drives and 171 slots, remote management software included.

Here’s a new appliance from start-up Index Engines, and it’s entirely original. Called Index Engines Appliance ES-X00, it indexes data on the fly as they flow from the storage network to the backup data device. The idea is simple, but seems highly efficient, with a speed of 3.5 million words per second or 70MB/s for Microsoft Office.

For unstructured data, the index requires 8% of their total capacity, which means that, for example, for 1TB of data, the index requires 80GB, according to the company.

The insertion of the appliance improves the backup window by 5%, according to the company, and it supports 700 queries per second using a Web search tool.

The ES-100 model ($29,500) can access up to 4 million indexed documents, the ES-200 ($34,500) up to 8 million.

A maximum of 64 appliances can be clustered for multi-tape drive environments.

For the moment, the appliance supports Microsoft Office, text, html, PDF and compressed zip tiles, with Exchange and PST files to come.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 209 on June 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.