Sony Australia announce fourth generation Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT).
With 200GB of native capacity, AIT-4 offers affordable SuperDrive class performance for automated and server backup products.
“AIT-4 offers a backwards compatible upgrade path to our existing AIT-1, 2 and 3 products,” commented Peter Norman, of Sony Australia’s Business Solutions Division. “There were 500,000 AIT drives and 10 million AIT media in use during 2003. According to IDC, AIT use has almost doubled in one year. With AIT-4 we are extending our AIT storage platform, offering these users a clear upgrade path and ensuring that the AIT market share will continue to grow.”
AIT-4 drives are backwards read compatible with all AIT media since the first generation and fully backwards read and write compatible with AIT-3 media. This means that the AIT technology capacity range can effectively scale from entry-level to the more demanding server backup environments. No other technology can provide a single scalable format with this range - the only alternative would be to migrate to different tape technologies as storage demands increase.
With AIT-4 continuing to double capacities and Sony now able to offer a solution for every sector of the market with the ability to scale from one generation to the next as demand requires - long-term investment for AIT customers is guaranteed. Moreover AIT WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many) media are available to provide an added level of data protection and help ensure file integrity in today’s age of government mandated data retention regulations.
The improvements required to continually increase AIT storage capacity and performance were made possible by Sony innovations applied in the AIT-4 drive and recording media design. A density increase from 720 Mbit/si to 1170 Mbit/si, 7% longer tape and an optimised data structure allowed the doubling of the storage capacity compared to the AIT-3 format.
Backup speeds could also be doubled, without sacrificing data integrity or reliability, by combining a higher head drum rotation speed with Advanced MIG read heads and AME (Advanced Metal Evaporated) tape. As a result, the latest generation offers a sustained transfer rate of 24MB/s native, positioning AIT-4 clearly as the leading tape storage format for the 3.5-inch form factor.
Sony will be shipping AIT-4 evaluation drives in the second quarter of 2004, with volume shipments of drives and automated products using the technology, including AIT-4 versions of the LIB-81 and LIB-D81 autoloaders and LIB-162 library, arriving in the August-September.
