Imation launches line of NAS appliances for nearline, offline storage

07.10.2011
Imation, a vendor of removable storage medium that includes hard disk drives and magnetic tape, today announced its first network-attached storage appliance aimed at offloading data from primary storage to near-line disk backup and remote disk archives.

Imation's new appliances come from . The appliances come in two distinct lines: the Imation InfiniVault archival product and the DataGuard multi-tiered, data-archive and data-protection appliance.

The difference between the two is the use of the disk drive technology. The InfiniVault system combines fixed RAID hard disk drives and Imation's RDX removable hard disk drives, which can be taken off site and stored like magnetic tapes or used to populate a cloud storage service offering. The InfiniVault appliance is shipping now.

The DataGuard appliance is a backup target that uses hard drives and RDX removable drives to provide data protection within existing backup infrastructures. It comes in both a tower and rack model and uses RDX removable hard drives to retain backups and to seed the cloud infrastructure. The Imation DataGuard appliance will be available through authorized Imation resellers and dealers early next year.

The rack-mountable versions of both new appliances are 3U (5.25-in high) servers that hold up to 100 of Imation's RDX removable hard disk storage disks or embedded 2.5-in disk drives. The appliances hold a maximum of 120TB of capacity. Additional 3U enclosures can be added for more storage capacity.

InfiniVault is a NAS-based archive storage appliance that stores files in "vaults" formed from the creation of storage pools of either online hard disk drive-based storage, or nearline, removable RDX storage or offline RDX disks that have been remotely stored away.