Media Logic Inc has finally finished its dance of the seven veils over exactly what the first product from its new Boulder, Colorado-based MediaLogic ADL Inc subsidiary. It claims that its Scalable Library Architecture family of automated storage libraries deliver an unprecedented level of upgradability, configuration flexibility and performance using 8mm tape cartridges. The first product comes in three models with two 8mm drives in the smallest, 12 in the biggest, and interchangeable DataPaks with 14, 28, 52 and 88 cartridges for on-line capacity of more than 1Tb. All Scalable Library Architecture products are field-upgradable, so customers can add drives, higher-capacity DataPaks and other options as changing storage requirements dictate, and the company reckons this is a first. It also claims to offer the ability to interchange data on a variety of physical media; to meet the need to scale the data-handling and data-throughput capabilities of the library as capacities increase; and to offer maximum data availability within tight budgets. One of the most visible areas where conventional library designs are lacking, it reckons, is data-handling capability. In standard library designs, a single robotic mechanism loads cartridges into the drive so that even in multidrive configurations, data availability is restricted by the time it takes to load each drive sequentially. In the Scalable Library Architecture, a high-speed motor drives the DataPak so that any cartridge is available to any of the 12 drives in two seconds or less. Each drive is equipped with an individual cartridge-loading mechanism, so that all 12 drives can be loaded with new cartridges simultaneously, in the time it takes standard libraries to load just one drive. It is also claimed to solve the problem of accessing data stored on different cartridge formats because an optional MixedMedia Interchange drawer, accessible from the front of the library, can be equipped with up to five standard SCSI devices, such as 4mm Digital Audio Tape, DC2000 tape drives, rewritable optical drives or hard disk drives. A cartridge can be loaded into a MixedMedia port with data transferred to the main library storage – the DataPak, or duplicate copies of data within the DataPak can be transferred to a different medium within the MixedMedia Interchange drawer. The SLA-8base is a 14- and 28-cartridge entry-level model with 98Gb or 196Gb of near-line storage capacity in native mode and 196Gb to 392Gb using 2:1 hardware data compression. The library can access any of 14 or 28 cartridges in two seconds or less, the firm says, and is capable of aggregate data rates up to 3M-bytes per second. A maximum of three 8mm drives can be used simultaneously. The SLA-8plus has up to six 8mm drives, and delivers data throughput of up to 6M-bytes per second. The 52-cartridge DataPak provides 364Gb of native mode storage, 728Gb compressed. It is backwards-compatible with the 14- and 28-cartridge DataPaks. The high end SLA-8max offers 1.23Tb of capacity in compressed mode. Using up to 12 drives with parallel data transfer, throughput is improved to 12.2M-bytes per second, yet accessing any of the 88 8mm cartridges in the DataPak still takes only two seconds or less. It is backwards-compatible with the 14-, 28- and 52-cartridge DataPaks. The SLA-8base, SLA-8plus and SLA-8max models can be upgraded with larger-capacity DataPaks and are field-upgradable with additional 8mm tape drives in an 8.75 by 17 by 21.75 footprint for the SLA-8base and SLA-8plus models, and in an 8.75 by 17 by 34.25 footprint for the SLA-8max model. All the 8mm libraries will be available in fourth-quarter 1994, with end-user pricing starting at $9,325 for the SLA-8base model with the 14-cartridge DataPak and one 8mm drive. Scalable Library Architecture families for 4mm Digital Audio, and Digital Linear Tape.
