Sony loads on the intelligence

Sony has launched its first Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT) autoloaders in the form of the TSL-SA300C (external) and the TSL-A300C (internal), both offering up to 200GB of storage spread over four AIT cartridges.

The two new compact autoloaders will offer a native capacity of 100GB on four cartridges in an exchangeable magazine, which can be doubled using ALDC compression. This provides a 200GB exchangeable 'virtual' tape cartridge, for automatic backup of large volumes of data.

AIT boasts a number of advanced features, most notably the MIC (Memory in Cassette) chip. This stores index information of the data stored on the cartridge and is used to increase search and retrieval times. Other features of AIT include AME (Advanced Metal Evaporated) tape, which should deliver improved tape reliability, and ALDC (Adaptive Lossless Data Compression), developed by IBM.

Sony has also added two new DDS3 tape autoloaders to its range of eight-cartridge autoloaders: the TSL-9000L (internal) and the TSL-S9000L (external).

Unlike the AIT autoloaders, these new DDS3 devices are ideally suited to providing unattended tape backup of a full week's data.

The AIT TSL-SA300C and TSL-A300C are both available now at #3,699 and #3,399 respectively. The DDS-3 TSL-S9000L and TSL-9000L are also available now at #2,242 and #2,030 respectively.

Sony UK: (01932) 816660.