Tape drives are a form of digital storage devices which use tape for information recording. Because of the cost effective nature of the tape material and their long archival life, tape drives are widely used for backup and archival purposes. A tape drive cannot be accessed randomly like with the hard drives to read a particular piece of data. However, the tape drives can stream data very fast once they are positioned to the particular data point. Because of this factor, tape drives cannot be used for daily storage purposes. There are many formats available for storage of digital information on tape drives. Some of the popular ones are DDS (Digital Data Storage), AIT (Advanced intelligent tape) introduced by Sony and many others. These formats have several generations. AIT is a high speed format for data storage on tapes.
The raw data capacity of tape drives is fixed. However, more amounts of data can be stored on them by using compression. Most of the tape drives have a compression ratio of 2:1. Some tape drives when used with only certain data types can achieve a compression of about 10:1 also. Tape drives can be connected to the computer by using a SCSI interface or other common types as firewire and usb. The reliability according to the recently conducted surveys is not good. Most companies do not test or try to recover from tape archives and some companies that do experienced 77 % failure in achieving a backup of stored data. So, many of the companies in 2011 are starting to move from a tape based back-up solution to a disk based solution.
A large collection of tapes in a huge structure with a mechanical tape loading device is called a tape library. Tape libraries are used for heavy data archival needs like that of financial records of a company. These data facilities take up a lot of money to setup and maintain. A tape library is a digital archive that can store huge amounts of data ranging from several TB to few PetaByte or few 1000 TBs. A trade off exists for higher storage capacities. The access time becomes slower because of mechanical parts and machines when the storage amount increases. Tape autoloaders are tape library devices with a single drive. There are several software technologies for operation of tape libraries. Some of them include open source tape library softwares like AMANDA, Bacula, and the minimal mtx program.
By: Sandeep Mahanthi
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Showing posts with label AIT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AIT. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2011
Sony’s contribution to tape drive storage: AIT which means Advanced Intelligent Tape
Advanced Intelligent Tape or better known as AIT is a high speed data format which is used for storage of digital data on tape drives. AIT was discontinued by Sony in 2010 and Sony announced its collaboration with HP on development of DDR tape drive format. AIT used a cassette similar to Video8. Super AIT or SAIT is an advanced and a high capacity variant of the normal AIT tape drive. Both AIT and SAIT use helical scan method for data transfer similar to VCR device. AIT technology is primarily available in two physical form factors. One is AIT –8 mm which uses a dual reel cartridge tape drive and is similar to Sony's 8 mm videotape products and Exabyte's 8 mm data tape products. The second product is SAIT ½ inch form which used a single reel cartridge and was similar to DLT and LTO. Several generations of AIT technology are backwards and forward compatible with each other. This is one of the outstanding features of AIT technology.
Let us take a small peek in to many generations of AIT technology developed.
AIT 1: Originally, AIT 1 specification supported 25 GB of uncompressed data storage with a data transfer speed of nearly 3 MB per second. By extending the tape drive’s length, the data storage was improved in modified versions. AIT 1 was further developed to achieve speeds of 4 MB per second and also 6 MB per second and was called AIT Turbo. An economic version named AIT E Turbo was released with storage spaces of about 40 GB. AIT’s main competitor was DDS technology which was also one of the widely popular Tape Drive storage technologies.
AIT 2: The capacity and the speeds were doubled when compared to AIT 1. A new technology called WORM was introduced which meant Write once Read many. The turbo variant of AIT 2 had double the speed of AIT 2 and about 50 per cent more storage space.
AIT 3: This had double the capacity and data transfer speeds of AIT 2. The Ex version has 50 % more space and 100 % more speed than AIT 3.
AIT 4: Again, the capacity and data transfer speeds were doubled when compared to AIT 3. Different chemical composition was used for the tape for improvement in performance. This generation of AIT is not compatible with the previous ones.
AIT 5: The same double the capacity and speed factor of Sony’s AIT is repeated. This was the last generation of AIT.
By: Sandeep Mahanthi
Let us take a small peek in to many generations of AIT technology developed.
AIT 1: Originally, AIT 1 specification supported 25 GB of uncompressed data storage with a data transfer speed of nearly 3 MB per second. By extending the tape drive’s length, the data storage was improved in modified versions. AIT 1 was further developed to achieve speeds of 4 MB per second and also 6 MB per second and was called AIT Turbo. An economic version named AIT E Turbo was released with storage spaces of about 40 GB. AIT’s main competitor was DDS technology which was also one of the widely popular Tape Drive storage technologies.
AIT 2: The capacity and the speeds were doubled when compared to AIT 1. A new technology called WORM was introduced which meant Write once Read many. The turbo variant of AIT 2 had double the speed of AIT 2 and about 50 per cent more storage space.
AIT 3: This had double the capacity and data transfer speeds of AIT 2. The Ex version has 50 % more space and 100 % more speed than AIT 3.
AIT 4: Again, the capacity and data transfer speeds were doubled when compared to AIT 3. Different chemical composition was used for the tape for improvement in performance. This generation of AIT is not compatible with the previous ones.
AIT 5: The same double the capacity and speed factor of Sony’s AIT is repeated. This was the last generation of AIT.
By: Sandeep Mahanthi
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