XenData, which sells tape and cloud archive systems, is adding support for ALTO spun-down disk archives so customers can manage tape, disk, and cloud storage under a single file system with built-in replication.
XenData provides products such as on-prem X-Series LTO tape archives and Media Portal viewers for the media and entertainment industry and allied customers. Disk Archive Corp, based in Reading, UK, provides the ALTO – “Alternative to LTO” – high-availability, high-security, enterprise-class archives and content libraries. They are designed for the film, television, legal evidence, military, medical, and forensic data preservation markets, with more than 500 systems in daily use.
XenData CEO Dr Phil Storey stated: “Customers will be able to archive their files on ALTO disks, LTO cartridges and public cloud for the ultimate in redundancy across storage types. For those that want to simply archive their content to ALTO, our appliances offer a high-performance storage solution suitable for a range of applications. These include video production, post-production, medical imaging, video surveillance, and in science and engineering when there is a need for high-capacity active archives.”
A 4RU ALTO III chassis holds up to 60 x 22 TB spun-down disk drives providing up to 1,320 TB capacity. This is called a MAID or massive array of idle drives configuration. Expansion chassis with an additional 60 slots can be added, supporting up to 660 disk slots per node and close to 10 PB of storage. This cold storage reduces power consumption to 0.25 W/TB and greatly extends disk life to more than ten years. ALTO employs data file replication technology, creating multiple non-segmented replicas on removable media. It supports seamless distribution of systems between a customer’s premises and geographically separated locations. Disk Archive Corp claims ALTO offers a lower lifetime cost of ownership than any other archive technology.
When data on the disks is required, the drive is spun up and the data comes online. XenData notes that, compared to LTO tape, ALTO-enabled XenData appliances are attractive for active archives with a lot of concurrent restores, as multiple disks may be spun up and accessed simultaneously.
XenData appliances present a single file system that scales to 100-plus PB and may be accessed as a standard network share via SMB, NFS, and FTP. The appliances adhere to the standard Microsoft security model based on Active Directory and can be easily added to existing Windows domains or workgroups and accessed by standard applications without the need for any special APIs.
ALTO support for XenData’s X20-S and X40-S appliances will be available in late October 2025.
