Exabyte Serverless Fibre Channel Tape Drives

Backup systems vendor Exabyte Corporation today announced it is embedding the extended copy command for serverless backup in its native Fibre Channel M2(TM) (Mammoth-2) tape drives to enhance the storage area network (SAN) performance and capabilities of Exabyte tape libraries.

“When we embed extended copy for serverless backup in the M2 tape drive, snapshot backups can stream to each drive 24 hours a day, without eating up server cycles,” said Jim Campbell, SAN alliance manager at Exabyte. “With server overheads out of the loop, backups and restores often go 4 to 5 times faster.”

According to Exabyte, serverless backup allows backups to proceed directly from the disk to the tape without the data passing through the server and interfering with normal server functions. Because extended copy command is embedded in M2’s firmware, the M2 will allow backup and recovery to occur directly between disk and tape drive, removing the management, overhead and cost of this operation from the server.