Entry-Level MO Jukeboxes All Grown Up

By Lowell Rapaport

The market for magneto optical (MO) storage is still growing, but the growth has been concentrated at the upper extremes of the market. Smaller jukeboxes have been declining in popularity, losing out to competitors including DVD and low-cost RAID systems.

With products like Kubota’s 104 Gigabyte (GB) DJ20 DVD-RAM jukebox selling for less than $6,000 (see Best of AIIM 2000) and low-end 100 GB and 200 GB RAID systems selling for even less, it is becoming harder to justify the cost of a small MO jukebox.

It came as no surprise, then, when Hewlett Packard (www.hp.com/go/optical) replaced its 83.2 GB 80ex jukebox with the new 125ex jukebox. The major difference being that the 125ex has 24 rather than 16 slots. This translates to 50 percent more capacity — a total of nearly 125 GB with the current generation of 2.6 GB-per-side MO media. At $8,000 with a single Sony drive and $11,000 with dual drives, this makes the 125ex more competitive with low-end RAID systems while providing WORM features and durability and performance not found on DVD-RAM. Software support is no problem. Hewlett Packard jukeboxes are universally supported by all the major jukebox management packages.

SureStor 125ex
Hewlett Packard
Greeley, CO, 970-679-5000
www.hp.com/go/optical
Drives: One or two Sony MO drives
Slots: 24
Capacity: 125 gigabytes
Reliability: Drive - 100,000 hours mean time between failure; robotics - 1 million swaps between failure
Price: $8,000 with one drive; $11,000 with two drives.
Advantages: HP reliability, universal support among jukebox management software.
Disadvantages: MO jukeboxes are falling behind other near-line storage devices in network attachment, partitioning and programmability.

The 125ex is quite simply a taller version of the 80ex. Five inches taller to be exact (24.6” vs. 19.5”). HP also replaced the 80ex’s single ended SCSI-2 port with one that also supports differential SCSI. This permits longer SCSI cable lengths, a useful feature with jukeboxes too large to place on a table.

Performancewise, the 125ex is a twin to the 80ex, and it is ideal for small companies that need unerasable WORM (write once, read many) media for legal or regulatory reasons. If you have a data center with large jukeboxes, a 125ex can be kept on hand for recording, freeing the larger jukeboxes for retrieval.

New technologies like built-in partitioning, network based management and dedicated thin servers are beginning to show up on tape libraries and DVD jukeboxes. We’d like to see these technologies appear on MO jukeboxes, but even without them, the 125ex is still a solid performer. Since it is universally supported by jukebox management software, there is no doubt you can be easily integrated into your storage environment. Prices have come down so that buyers will gain the extra capacity of the 125ex at about the same price as the old 80ex. As always, you the same quality and performance found in other Hewlett Packard jukeboxes, with a respectable robotics reliability rating of 1 million mean swaps between failure.