Anaheim, California-based ATL Products Limited, which specializes in DLT Digital Linear Tape libraries, says it is working on a system which will be able to handle data from both Unix and Windows NT servers. The difficulty with achieving this at the moment, says the company, is that the storage management software vendors – like Veritas Software Corp and Legato Systems Inc- do not offer software that can support this kind of partitioning. The company says it will initially achieve this by adding a server between the data source and its DLT library, which will handle the separation of the two data streams. But ATL admits that this is a quick and dirty approach to the problem. Later this year it will bring out a DLT library that can handle both data streams without the additional server layer. It says it hopes to achieve this with a new ‘Prism’ architecture, which will enable an embedded server to handle the partitioning and other data management tasks. This new range will be announced in March and should ship by the end of May. The first model, the P1000, will store up to 300Gb and cost less than $20,000. ATL says it has had to go down this road because of market demand, and because storage management software vendors are unlikely to build partitioning into their products in the near future – it would be expensive, and a different version would have to be compiled for each hardware vendor.
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