Understanding AIT Technology & It's Drives

This page is part of the Business Advice Centre section of this web site - a selection of documents and files that are designed to help, guide and enlighten elements of Information Technology to those in business

If your backup capacity needs expanding AIT will be the next generation for you, but what is AIT?  

Advanced Intelligent Tape is the most compact, reliable and affordable tape product in its class. It also offers some of the best performance on the market. On top of which a strong product roadmap and full read/write compatibility with previous generations means you'll never have to throw away your existing AIT tapes. Making your investment and your data the safest in the business. 

There are seven key advantages to using AIT:

Ease of migration
AIT offers the perfect migration path from virtually any tape format to a high performance future proof technology.

High performance
AIT draws on high-end technology and components to offer the best performance in every price band.

Compact size
AIT delivers the highest capacity to size ratio - up to six times more than other drives.

Reliability
AIT drives have the lowest failure rate in the market and offer a 30 year tape media life.

Future Roadmap
AIT offers a dependable high performance solution for the next 10 years or more.

Compatibility
AIT secures investment in previous generations when users update their backup systems!

Value for money
AIT offers the best combination of features at the best price of any competing technology

Using the latest high density, helical scan recording technology, AIT offers capacities of more than three times that of DAT products. And that's in addition to cutting edge performance and reliability that's up to six times greater than the latest generation DAT!

AIT-1. The upgrade path for DDS-2 and DDS-3 users
AIT-1 is the perfect entry point for a business looking to upgrade their existing backup technology.

Delivering up to 91GB (3 times greater than DDS-3) in the same compact 3.5 inch form factor, AIT-1 drives are the ideal plug and play replacement for any generation of DDS drive.

They are also 6 times more reliable, and will backup your data in quarter of the time it takes a DDS-3 drive to do the same job.

AIT-2. The next step for DDS-4 users
With a compressed capacity of 130 GB in a single tape, a backup rate of up to 37.4 GB/hr, AIT-2 is setting new standards for professional backup.

And despite the fact that AIT-2 is 3 times quicker, 6 times more reliable, and offers up to 300% more capacity than a DDS-4 drive, Sony’s AIT-2 drives are now available at a similar price.

AIT-3. The Next Generation
For demanding multi-server and multi-user environments where capacity is key and space is a premium, Sony’s latest generation AIT-3 has the features to match.

Offering up to a staggering 260GB on a single 8 mm cassette, AIT-3 can store your business critical information at a rate of up to 112GB/hr, ensuring large volumes of data are backed up in no time.

Not only that but with a Mean Time Between Failure rate of 400,000 hours under constant use, AIT-3 leads the field when it comes to reliability. 

The S-AIT format is a new tape-based data storage technology developed to cope with the ever-increasing storage needs of the networked broadband era.

By making the most of AIT (Advanced Intelligent Technology) features, such as helical-scan recording technology, Advanced Metal Evaporated (AME) tape and Remote Memory in Cassette (R-MIC), S-AIT achieves a massive 500 GB storage capacity and a transfer rate of up to 30MB/sec native in a single-reel, half-inch tape cartridge. Production of the S-AIT format drive and media are planned for the end of 2002.

The half-inch S-AIT tape cartridge is the standard size and thus ensures minimal costs will be when integrating S-AIT products into existing automation solutions. Also the R-MIC chip contains the tape's system log, search map and user-definable information, allowing the drive to advance at high speed directly to any file on the tape.

The reliability of the S-AIT drive draws on innovative features such as automatic head cleaning system and an effective "leader block" tape threading system with a simplified tape load path.

The Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT) Forum is an industry consortium of hardware and software companies dedicated to advancing the art of data storage and protection through the widespread adoption of AIT drive and format technology as an industry standard.

Sony & other manufacturers are sponsors of AIT technology, are members of the AIT Forum support website, www.aittape.com  an online information centre to learn the latest about AIT technology, solutions, and competitive advantages. The AIT Forum welcomes you to this site and invites you to share any insights or inquiries regarding either AIT technology or the AIT Forum.

If you would like to request additional information about AIT technology, solutions, or the AIT Forum, please contact www.aittape.com