Exabyte Corp. and The TOLIS Group Inc. have certified the Exabyte 221L LTO Ultrium tape library archive system for use with Mac OS X. The hardware works in conjunction with the Mac OS X version of TOLIS’s own BRU command line interface software to provide multiple tape backup and restore capabilities for Mac OS X, over Fibre Channel or SCSI.
Designed to support one or two LTO tape drives and up to 21 data cartridges, Exabyte’s 221L is designed for desktop and enterprise operations. It can be configured in either SCSI or Fibre Channel options. The 221L model sports a 5U design that can be either rack mounted or used on a tabletop.
TOLIS Group president Tim Jones said that his company has seen sustainable throughput in excess of 66.5MB/sec using Xserve RAID, with combined dual-drive throughput to the Exabyte 221L library of over 40MB/sec. “In this configuration, the solution will back up 108GB/hr,” he added.
Although this announcement notes the certification of the Exabyte 221L system, BRU is more flexible than just that, according to the TOLIS Group. It’ll also work with FireWire and USB tape drives, removable media, disk farms, and even USB-based flash media drives like ThumbDrives and PenDrives.
Look for the Mac OS X version of BRU to be available from The Tolis Group’s Web site. Attendees of this week’s NAB 2003 conference can see a demonstration of the technology at booth SL601. NAB 2003 runs through April 10, 2003 at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.