Partitioned AIT

Access To Data
Tape technologies continue to provide higher capacities and transfer rates every 18 to 24 months, but better access to data has become very limited. Tandem users, needing critical data at rapid speed, often forgo new technology and high capacity solutions to maintain fast access of files on small capacity cartridges such as 18- and 36-track technology. Time and labor is usually intensive because of the huge inventory and difficult management of small capacity cartridges.

Need for Capacity
Tandem users often look to DLT drives for higher capacity and less tape handling. Usually the full capacity is never reached because of slow transfer rates or small jobs, using only a fraction of the expensive tape. Speed to data becomes critically slow for most high capacity cartridge users due to the sequential search through huge amounts of data stored on each tape.

The Solution
Partitioned AIT delivers rapid access to stored data plus tremendous capacity, merging the best of 36-track technology with the high capacity of AIT technology by the use of partitioning. Using a captive, non-volatile memory chip, known as Memory-In-Cartridge, or MIC, the drive segments each data cartridge into partitions, which the Tandem identifies as individual tapes. The number of partitions is user-definable from the front panel of the drive. Because AIT can position the cartridge very rapidly (average: 60 seconds) to the correct segment of tape, a file can be located in a specific partition, eliminating search time of any other segment of tape. On a full DLT cartridge, the same file restore operation can take 10 to 50 times longer.

Think of a single data cartridge as a "virtual stack" of tapes in a 5194ACL, able to write single small jobs to each partition, equivalent to an individual tape, or large jobs over several partitions. It can even be configured in a loop to continually write new data over its own scratch partitions. The low cost per gigabyte for a high capacity tape is now achievable because the entire 25 to 50 gigabyte data cartridge (65 to 130 GB at 2.6:1 compression) can be used from beginning to end.

Easy Migration
From K- to S-Series our series of AIT drive solutions emulate a standard 5190/5194/5196 as a plug-and-play replacement. With any of our partitioned AIT configurations, the drive appears to the host as a 5194/5196 Automatic Cartridge Loader (ACL) tape subsystem. This means that our drives work on Tandem's standard tape interfaces such as K-based 3216, as well as S-based PMF, IOMF and ServerNet D/A. As you move to S-Series, the AIT drive not only moves with you, but is a high-capacity migration tool too.

Technical Specifications