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ADIC Sticks In Some Disk

Latching onto the snowballing trend of disk-to-disk backup, Advanced Digital Information Corp. (Nasdaq: ADIC) plans to offer an integrated ATA-based RAID disk option for its Scalar i2000 tape library by the end of the year.

ADIC CEO Peter van Oppen, in an interview with Byte and Switch, says the company is responding to customer demand for shorter backup and recovery windows, key advantages afforded by a disk-based backup architecture. While the throughput of high-end tape libraries can match that of disk storage, they can require 30 seconds or more to retrieve and load individual tape cartridges.

"It is evident that restoring data is easier from disk," he says. "But we think it's important to have the ability to migrate the data from disk to tape." ADIC was unable to provide pricing or other details for the i2000 disk option.

Vendors that have tried to exploit the move toward putting secondary storage -- such as backup or archive data -- on low-cost disk have included the traditional disk storage systems companies, such as EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP). Quantum Corp. (NYSE: DSS) and Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) have also introduced products tailored to disk-based backup and archiving, but these are separate from their tape arrays.

Meanwhile, Overland Storage Inc. (Nasdaq: OVRL) today announced it has acquired disk-based backup appliance startup Okapi Software Inc. (see Overland Buys Okapi for $5M, Disk Backup's a Red-Hot Idea, and our report, Disk Backup 101).

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