Product Reviews

Originally developed by DEC, DLT (digital linear tape) was acquired in 1994 by hard disk manufacturer Quantum. Since then it's been aggressively marketed and is now one of the top choices for enterprise-level backup. Although significant progress has been made with other tape technologies, DLT still offers the highest capacity, but the downside is that the drives are comparatively expensive.

ADIC's FastStor is a more cost-effective alternative as it combines a DLT drive and a seven-tape autoloader for the low price of £4,495. This works out at around 30 per cent more cash for a 700 per cent increase in storage capacity over a single DLT drive. At 235 « 590 « 190mm, it won't take up much space either. In fact, it's so small it takes up the same amount of space as a single drive in a rack-mount system.

Smart internal design is responsible for the small footprint, as only five of the cartridge slots are accessible from the front. The other two slots are inside at the rear above the DLT drive, while the changer mechanism sits in between. The review model had a DLT4000 drive fitted, but this can be easily swapped for a DLT7000 (£7,600). The drive and power supply are mounted on a separate assembly accessed from the rear to allow for easy upgrades.

For testing, the drive was connected

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to a Pentium Pro/200 server with 64Mb of RAM, running Windows NT Server 4. For optimum performance, the FastStor used a dedicated Mylex FlashPoint SCSI card, while an integrated Adaptec AIC 7880P Ultra/Wide chip looked after hard disk demands. For backup software I used Cheyenne's ARCserve and Seagate's Backup Exec. The latter posed a problem in that I had an earlier version that lacked built-in autoloader support. Unless you're using version 7.1 you'll need to download the bnt7ilod.exe patch from Seagate's Web site at tech.seagatesoftware.com/ftp/descriptions/. You'll also need to apply Service Pack 3 to Windows NT.

As usual, ARCserve proved much more co-operative, as its generic device drivers identified the FastStor correctly first time. However, there is a catch here because the autoloader software modules are both optional extras, with ARCserve priced at £485, while Backup Exec costs £449.

Performance-wise, the FastStor delivered backup speeds that tallied with ADIC's quoted figures. Under ARCserve, it secured 1.5Gb of mixed files in 13 minutes for an average speed of 115Mbytes/min. Backup Exec was noticeably faster at 139Mbytes/min because it defaults to a larger block size of 32K as opposed to the 16K used by ARCserve. The autoloader was easily controlled from the software, although the mechanism was fairly slow and took close to 11 minutes to run a complete inventory of all seven slots. Tape spanning is supported, so if your backup job fills up one tape, the FastStor can be set to load the next available one and carry on.

On price alone the FastStor is hard to ignore as it offers so much more than a single DLT drive. Build quality is excellent, and ADIC gets a gold star for packing so much into such a small box. For a low-cost enterprise backup solution with good performance and high capacity, ADIC's FastStor should be near the top of your list.