NAB 2016

NAB 2016: Spectra Logic Unveils Tape Library With Exabyte Capacity

Spectra Logic unveiled Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition, which it says is the world’s largest and most richly featured tape storage system and is designed to address the needs of organizations with exponential data growth.

spectra logic library

Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition with custom skin for personalization

It provides performance, reliability, and flexibility at a lower price point, for long-term data retention in a smaller storage footprint. It is the first tri-media tape library compatible with LTO drives and media, TS1150 tape technology, and Oracle’s StorageTek T10000D, T10000C, T10000B, and T10000A enterprise tape-drive technology — providing the flexibility to integrate LTO or enterprise tape-technology media at the lowest price per gigabyte. Organizations now have the ability to switch vendors, if needed, and migrate existing data to their technology of choice.

Since 2008, Spectra Logic has worked with engineers in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA’s Ames Research Center, first deploying a Spectra tape library with 22 petabytes of capacity. According to NASA, the Spectra tape library’s capacity has grown to approximately one-half an exabyte of archival storage. After extensive testing over the past year, NASA recently deployed a Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition in its 24×7 production HPC environment.

In addition to all features in the Spectra TFinity tape library, the TFinity ExaScale Edition provides the following:

  • Rational robotics
  • High-performance transporter
  • Improved TeraPorter
  • Dual-robot operations
  • New parallel AC power input
  • SlotIQ
  • MediaIQ
  • LogIQ
  • Tri-media–capable, allowing migration or integration of existing T10000D media and drives.
  • Cold storage, enabling groups to vault infrequently accessed tapes inside the library so they become “invisible” to the application, reducing costs and allowing easy retrieval
  • An exabyte of capacity in a single footprint storage system with current media technology
  • Optional custom skins for personalization
  • Spectra’s BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway-enabled
  • Highest cartridge-exchange performance roadmap of any tape library system

Existing Spectra TFinity customers can easily and seamlessly upgrade to some or all of the new features.

“Organizations that produce massive amounts of data continually face the greatest storage challenge of our time: managing growth without complexity or cost. Tape is still the simplest, most cost-effective, energy-efficient storage media available,” says Spectra Logic CTO Matt Starr.

Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition offers organizations a new approach to high-capacity data storage with the addition of BlackPearl. Delivering an object-storage interface to tape, easy expansion and seamless migration are key features highlighting its flexibility.

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