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Sony and AIT-5.

Article Excerpt
Sony Electronics is now shipping its fifth generation of Advanced Intelligent Tape drives and attendant automation and media to OEMs and distribution channel partners. Sony kicked things off with a recent launch event in Los Angeles attended largely by resellers, distributors, and OEM partners.

With AIT-5, Sony has solved the backwards incompatibility issues that made for some industry grumbles with AIT-4. According to Alan Sund, general manager for tape storage at Sony, AIT offers the following benefits to users:

In terms of capacity, the AIT family is the broadest product line in today's tape market. The line spans from 20GB native to 400 GB native, which allows for a very wide choice of capacity using the same tape family. In contrast, DDS goes from 20GB to 36GB, and LTO starts at about 100GB. AIT allows enterprise customers to standardize on a single tape format, with remote offices with small storage needs working off smaller capacity AIT tape and the data center with AIT-5. This also allows for standardized tape within the data center, allowing the enterprise to back up small-capacity applications onto smaller AIT drives, and use higher capacity AIT for larger application data. AIT combines high density with a 3-1/2" form factor. This is significant given today's server chassis going out in slim-line configurations. (Intel only goes out with a 3-1/2" drive...

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