Tandberg Data announces Magnum 224 Tape Library with fourth-generation LTO technology

Tandberg Data, a global supplier of data protection and archiving technologies, has announced the availability of the Magnum 224 Tape Library with fourth-generation LTO tape drive technology (LTO-4). The Magnum 224 includes a robust feature set, a software bundle from Symantec and plug-and-play simplicity at an affordable price, making the capacity and performance of LTO-4 automation more widely accessible for smaller organizations.

With increased speed and capacity and the new hardware-based encryption capabilities of LTO-4, coupled with the ease-of-use and convenience of automation, the Magnum 224 is well suited to address the ever-growing demands for affordable, reliable, high-performance data protection.

Developed specifically for data-intense SMBs, departmental organizations and midrange enterprises, the Magnum 224 with an LTO-4 drive and two 12-cartridge magazines delivers native data transfer speeds of 120MB/s or 432GB/h and total native capacity of 19.2TB in a compact, 2RU enclosure. The library ships standard with a barcode scanner, Ethernet-based remote management, a single import/export media drawer, a rack-mount kit, a 24-cartridge magazine and Symantec Backup Exec QuickStart Edition software. The Magnum 224 can be used in multiserver environments and offers support for WORM functionality along with its standard features, affordability and warranty support.

The library's design allows existing Magnum 224 users with legacy LTO drives to swap out their prior-generation LTO drives and install new LTO-4 drives with the library still in its rack.

The new LTO-4 tape drive provides 100 percent more capacity and 50 percent greater transfer speed than the LTO-3 drive, bringing native capacity to 800GB (1.6TB compressed) and native transfer speed to 120MB/s (240MB/s compressed). The drive allows users to replace multiple drives with a single LTO-4 autoloader, which reduces points of failure in network architecture and lowers the total cost of ownership for tape drive hardware and media.

The LTO-4 also offers hardware-based encryption and can write encrypted data directly to the LTO Ultrium tape cartridge, adding another level of security to the storage and transport of sensitive information. Digital Speed Matching, a 256MB buffer and Dynamic Compression all improve drive performance. Diagnostic routines, such as the Statistical Analysis and Reporting System, assist in isolating failures between media and hardware, and Adaptive Tape Threading protects against failures during cartridge loads by verifying tape speed and the tape spinning wheel and modulates the tape thread by providing tension control. Independent tape loader and threader motors and positive pin retention ensure that the pin will be retained during a miss-pick. Graceful Dynamic Braking allows the reel motors to gradually decelerate, instead of stopping abruptly during an unexpected power down.

Robust algorithms using the Cartridge Memory (CM) in conjunction with low-level encoding, which is mastered on the tape media at the time of manufacture, are designed to prevent tampering. The LTO Ultrium format fourth-generation specifications include the ability for WORM-enabled and non-WORM-enabled drives to co-exist. In addition, appending data at the end of a WORM cartridge that was previously written to is supported, allowing customers to take full advantage of the high-capacity tape media.

For more information, visit http://www.tandbergdata.com/us.