Crossroads Adds More Automation to SPHiNX VTL

May 22, 2012 Alex Woodie

Crossroads Systems unveiled a new release of its SPHiNX virtual tape library (VTL) device at the recent COMMON conference at Disneyland. With SPHiNX version 8.3, Crossroads is giving users the capability to automatically trigger other events upon completion of an activity in the VTL.

Few processes stand by themselves in today’s IT environment, and backup is not one of them. When a database is successfully backed up, IT administrators often need to accomplish other tasks, such as replicating data to another server, applying encryption, activating post-process compression or de-duplication, or writing to tape.

With the upcoming release of SPHiNX version 8.3, ensuring that those events are executed will no longer require manual intervention by an operator, according to Glenn Haley, Crossroads senior product manager.

“In SPHiNX 8.3, Crossroads is enhancing the product to provide more automation with user-defined event policies and the ability to trigger other events to automatically occur without the need for additional user intervention,” Haley says.

Version 8.3, which is slated to ship at the end of June, will also feature updates to the Web management console, Haley said.

SPHiNX VLT devices offer protection of IBM i, Windows, and Linux environments. The device emulates LTO tape drives and libraries and connects to Power Systems servers via SCSI, Fibre Channel, and SAS connections. SPHiNX devices start at about $8,900 for about 3 TB of native storage capacity, and range up to devices that support 35 TB of storage.