Cube-Tec is an early adopter of the newly available StrongBox technology from Crossroads and has integrated it into its CubeWorkflow management environment. Crossroads offers its patented solutions to be able to take advantage of both disk and tape based media for long time archival. The StrongBox is using LTO-5 tapes with its Linear Tape File System (LTFS) and as such offers an open standard, high availability storage technology. It not only writes the data to tape, but routinely checks it for readability, and starts a migration process before any data loss can occur.

StrongBox presents itself as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device which can be mounted as a CIFS/NFS share. The archived files on tape stay permanently visible for the user. The big plus factor of this solution by Crossroads is its usage of the non-proprietary LTFS file system, which enables easy and flexible management of files. Through integration of the StrongBox into CubeWorkflow, the automation of the quality assurance and media migration processes is possible. Continuous quality checks, from retro-digitisation to cyclic tape migrations in the long time storage, are possible. All relevant process and quality information can be visualised in CubeWorkflow, for easy user supervision within CubeDashboard.

StrongBox offers the best opportunity to supervise the quality of tape library assets. With its patented 'self-healing' function, tapes which are getting older are identified and the data contained automatically gets copied over, before read errors happen. We are happy that Cube-Tec realized the advantage of this new technology and quickly integrated it into their solution.
- Bernd R. Krieger, Business Manager of Crossroads Europe GmbH

In the past, magnetic tape backup systems were proprietary solutions which in practical experience produced big follow-up costs. Our products want to boost process and data security while significantly lowering Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by open interfaces and intelligently automated solutions. CubeWorkflow, through cooperation with Crossroads, is able to directly access the internal management and quality assurance data in the StrongBox, evaluate it, and take safety measures - fully automated. Now users can enjoy the advantages of tape libraries to their full extent.
- Joerg Houpert, Technical Director of Cube-Tec International GmbH