Spectra Logic Rolls Out World’s Largest Capacity Tape Library

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spectraToday Spectra Logic announced the Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition, the world’s largest and most richly-featured tape storage system. Designed to address the needs of organizations with exponential data growth, the Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition provides performance, reliability and flexibility at a lower price point, for long-term data retention with a smaller storage footprint.

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,” said Matt Starr, chief technology officer, Spectra Logic. “While the C-Suite grapples with challenges around reliability, physical size and costs related to data, Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition addresses all of these concerns. It is truly the ‘total package’ and the top of the line tape product from Spectra Logic.”

TFinity addresses storage for groups that require long-term retention of massive amounts of data at a lower cost, such as The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the agency of the United States Federal Government responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research.

Since 2008, Spectra Logic has worked with engineers in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in California’s Silicon Valley, 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 today. After extensive testing over the past year, NASA recently deployed a Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition in their 24×7 production HPC environment.

As a leading provider of next-generation IT services to various government agencies, we’re always seeking to leverage the most advanced and secure solutions,” said Davin Chan, HPC Technical Director at CSRA Inc. “We use Spectra’s TFinity library for our NASA customer because of its impressive scalability. The new High Performance Transporter in the tape library delivers nearly twice the tape mount rate than our previous configuration, which has enabled our customers to improve efficiency by permitting faster access to archived data.”

The Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition 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 GB. Organizations now have the ability to switch vendors, if needed, and migrate existing data to their technology of choice. Existing Spectra TFinity customers can easily and seamlessly upgrade to some or all of the new features offered by the TFinity ExaScale Edition.

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 that highlight the superior flexibility offered by Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition.

With tape’s features and unbeatable cost, we believe that every business enterprise should consider tape as a major part of their long term storage and archive planning. The conception and design of this product was made possible by nearly 40 years of knowing our customers’ needs,” said Starr. “We work with CTOs and CIOs seeking libraries that can handle their gigantic data sets and serve them nimbly, with plenty of features and seamless scalability.”

Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition is the world’s largest single storage system and the world’s largest storage complex, offering unsurpassed storage density and the smallest footprint that delivers a 50 percent reduction in data center floor space through a highly efficient three-dimensional library design instead of slots, and TeraPack containers in place of individual cartridges.

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