This year's eight finalists in the data backup hardware category for the 2013 Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Products of the Year award represent a wide range of data protection products, from Oracle's high-speed ultra-high-capacity tape drive to Riverbed's cloud-attached appliance. Products eligible for consideration in this category include tape libraries and drives, backup media, disk backup targets, virtual tape libraries, deduplication devices and gateway appliances for cloud backup.

Actifio Inc. Actifio 6.0

The Actifio platform, which focuses on copy data management, has been upgraded with new role-based controls for self-service provisioning, multi-tenancy features, integration with billing systems and improved support for enterprise applications, including Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, SAP and Oracle.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. StoreEver MSL6480 Tape Library

HP's MSL6480 Tape Library targets the midrange, scales to 3.5 PB of capacity and boasts backup speeds up to 60.4 TB per hour with Fibre Channel (FC) drives. The system has a slot and tape drive density of 81 TB per 1U of rack space.

Netgear ReadyData 516 (RDD516)

The Netgear ReadyData 516 disk backup target offers several enterprise functions for small-to-midsize companies. Described as a "data center in a shoebox, " the system does block-level replication, deduplication and thin provisioning. It scales to 24 TB and supports solid-state drives for caching within a volume for enhanced performance.

Oracle Corp. StorageTek T10000D Tape Drive

Oracle'sStorageTek T10000D tape drive offers 8.5 TB of native capacity per cartridge, which is more than three times the capacity of LTO-6 drives and media. Other key features include support for the 16 Gbps FC interface, 10 Gbps Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) interface and Linear Tape File System, as well as built-in data encryption.

Quantum Corp. DXi6800 Deduplication Series

Quantum's DXi6800 Deduplication Series disk backup systems use a high-performance file system and intelligent metadata management to deliver up to 16 TB per-hour performance. The appliance provides from 13 TB to 156 TB of usable capacity in a single system.

Quantum Scalar i6000 Tape Library

Quantum's Scalar i6000 Tape Library comes with a high-density expansion module that increases slot capacity by 70% within a module. It also has active-active dual robots for better automated performance and control and data path failover for high availability.

Source: searchdatabackup.techtarget.com