OTG and MDI make NT announcements

Echoing numerous vendors' sentiments about NT's popularity, storage management software providers OTG

(Bethesda, MD, http://otgsoftware.com) and Micro Design International (MDI, Winter Park, FL, http://www.mdi.com) made NT announcements at AIIM.

OTG enhanced its DiskExtender and Application Extender applications for Windows NT. DiskExtender Version 3.2 includes support for DAT and DLT magnetic tape drives, while Application Extender 3.2 includes new features such as foreign file support, support for ISIS scanners and Oracle 7 server support.

Optical storage management application provider MDI brought out SCSI Express 3.0 for NT, which facilitates optical library data access and sharing for backup and archiving using optical storage that was once claimed to be too slow and too expensive for that purpose. The new version sports an improved graphical user interface that makes the optical drive look like a tape device, and it works with a variety of existing backup software programs. With the existing NetWare and new NT application, the company has phased out its Unix offerings.

Robert Weiner, OTG's VP of marketing, said he has seen more and more Unix vendors moving to NT. But the verdict is still not in on whether hierarchical storage management (HSM) for NT will prove to be a big market opportunity. Although NT users are requesting HSM, Weiner is "not so sure" that users will ultimately bring tape into the mix for archival purposes if it is more economically feasible for users to simply keep data accessible via hard drives for online work and via optical storage for long-term archiving.

Nonetheless, OTG did make a backup capability available for its DiskExtender software that supports tape and hard drives in response to user requests. The new backup capability extends the company's positioning as an automated mass storage solution provider, rather than bringing it into the fold of "backup" providers such as Legato (Palo Alto, CA, http://www.legato.com) or Cheyenne (Roslyn Heights, NY, http://www.cheyenne.com). What's next for OTG? Weiner says to look for a forthcoming product to attach to the network from the client side. And for MDI? The NT SCSI Express software now supports rewritable optical jukeboxes, but it will offer support for LIMDOW, with an API available by June.

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