The vendor is touting this hardware as a target for backup data, although up until now the devices could only handle 500-Gbyte disks. This, though, is still more than Dell and Tandberg, which offer a maximum capacity of 120 Gbytes on their respective removable disks.
Idealstor is using standard 3.5-inch SATA drives from Hitachi and Seagate, according to Ben Ginster, the vendor's channel marketing manager. "The whole point is that you're getting the speed of disk, but the portability of tape," he adds.
At least one analyst agrees that speed could be the key selling point for the technology. "It could take an hour or two to do a recovery from tape, but with a disk drive, you could recover the data in minutes," says Arun Taneja, founder of the Taneja Group.
These sentiments were echoed by Robb Doom, CIO of Franklin, Tennessee-based National Renal Alliance, which has deployed an Idealstor Backup Appliance running 750-Gybte drives. "Whenever we want to retrieve data from disk, it's hours faster than tape, it's instantaneous," he says.
The exec explained that his firm, which manages dialysis centers across the U.S., replaced a DLT tape infrastructure with the Backup Appliance thanks, in part, to reliability concerns. "Sometimes, if you use a tape over and over again, as you try to write data to it, it will become garbled," he says.
Bob Friday, Chief AI Officer for Juniper Networks, explains how the advanced technology is transforming operations.
Contact center leaders from 8x8, Awaken Intelligence, and 360insight discuss the importance of agent experience.
AI may force enterprises to rewire parts of their data centers so they are fully optimized to run such workloads. The question is do you use Ethernet or InfiniBand?
