ProStor Ramps Capacity, Challenges Tape

Removable disk cartridges are getting bigger, making RDX technology an increasingly viable alternative to tape, according to ProStor, which today announced its first 500-Gbyte offering.

ProStors RDX technology, which comprises a "dock" and 2.5-inch removable disk cartridge, previously had a maximum capacity of 300 Gbytes, although the vendor has now certified a 500-Gbyte disk drive.

By boosting its drive capacity by 67 percent, ProStor’s RDX offerings are more likely to lure users away from tape-based backup, according to Chris Bukowski, the vendor’s senior product marketing manager.

”As the basic disk drives for servers and laptops grow, we’re keeping pace,” he says, promising even higher capacities in the future. “By the end of this year, early next year, we will have a 750-Gigabyte cartridge, and, probably, three quarters or a year after that, we will have a Terabyte cartridge.”

Imation, which, along with Tandberg, licenses RDX technology from ProStor, was quick to jump on the 500-Gbyte bandwagon today. In a statement released this morning, Imation announced that it will offer a 500-Gbyte cartridge for SMBs later this month, priced at $550.RDX certainly seems to have the capacity edge on tape in the low-end of the backup market, where many users work with 72-Gbyte or 160-Gbyte DAT technology.

“On the low-end tape drives today, single cartridge backups aren’t necessarily available,” says ProStor’s Bukowski, adding that RDX already has an installed base of some 75,000 users.

At least one analyst thinks that smaller firms could do worse than look at RDX as a tape backup alternative, but warned that the technology is not a good fit for everyone.

“For customers that are using low end tape technology, things like DDS DAT, it does make sense,” says Robert Amatruda, research manager at IDC. “But once you start to manage more than a half a Tbyte of data, tape comes out on top in terms of economics.”

The analyst nonetheless says that RDX will be attractive to many small businesses, particularly ones looking for a simple backup technology.“For the ‘S’ in SMB, I would maintain that they have not been using tape for some time,” he says. “They have been disaffected by its cumbersome usage model.”

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