Gateway To Roll Out Low-Cost Tape Autoloaders

The company Wednesday introduced three devices based on DAT72-format tape drives, said Tim Diefenthaler, director of enterprise servers and storage at Gateway. "Because of all the servers we sell, tape backup is a high-attach product with Gateway," he said.

The first device, the Gateway 810 external tape autoloader, is a 2U rack-mount appliance initially configured with one DAT72 tape drive and room for six cartridges for up to 432 Gbytes of capacity.

The second device is an internal autoloader, also with one DAT72 drive and six tape slots. This device can fit inside the Gateway 810 case, putting two complete, separate autoloaders inside a single rack-mount enclosure, said Diefenthaler. The same internal autoloader also fits inside a Gateway model 960, 960X or 980 tower server in place of the stand-alone backup tape drive that might normally be placed there, he said.

Gateway is also making the DAT72 tape drive, manufactured by Certance, available as an internal drive for use in servers, Diefenthaler said. The drives can store up to 72 Gbytes of data at up to 80 MBps in compression mode.

The 810 external autoloader is priced at $2,499. The internal autoloader, which can be integrated into the external autoloader or a server in the field, is priced at $1,499. Individual Certance drives from Gateway are priced at $899.

The new tape-automation devices follow the company's August introduction of an autoloader featuring a Seagate-made LTO-2 tape drive and a maximum capacity of 1.6 TBytes in 2U of space for $5,999. At that time, the company also unveiled a 2U SCSI non-RAID array with Ultra320 SCSI connectivity and capacity of up to 2 TBytes.

All storage products will be available to Gateway's solution providers via the company's recently introduced ProNet channel program, said Diefenthaler.

Under ProNet, two types of partners can work with Gateway, Diefenthaler said. The first is a traditional solution provider that takes the lead in the sales in exchange for a hardware margin and all services related to the sale.

The second falls under what Gateway calls its Network Service Provider program, under which the sale is driven by the vendor's direct-sales force, which then brings in a partner to do the services. In exchange, the partner gets some hardware margin and 80 percent of the services revenue, said Diefenthaler.

Gateway is taking orders for the devices now, with delivery expected in the next two weeks.