SEPATON today announced an appliance offering the industry’s first secondary storage capabilities designed for multi-tenancy in a cloud environment. The appliance creates virtual tape cartridge
s (which are physically on disks but perceived by back-up servers as tape devices) that use what the company calls Storage Pool technology to prevent inadvertent intermingling of data, and enable data to be automatically assigned to a virtual tape device that meets various policy requirements.
These capabilities are all associated with the release of software version 5.4 of the company’s S2100™-ES2 data protection appliance.
The company argues that although tape is seen as a less expensive medium for secondary storage than disks, other factors can change the equation, including the cost advantages of virtualized storage, the appliance’s de-duplication capabilities and the cost avoidance associated with the maintenance of tape drives.
The company uses the LUN masking techniques developed for disk drives to ensure (in the case of an outsourcing scenario) that back up servers from Client A can only see virtual tape device A, servers from Client B can only see virtual tape device B, and so on. The systems are also protected by conventional access controls.
In addition to managing secondary storage, the appliance can also provide auto-replication to remote sites if required, as well as guaranteed erasure of information on virtual tape cartridges.