BOULDER, Colo., April 19 — Spectra Logic, the deep storage experts, today announced 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, such as media and entertainment, high performance computing and traditional IT, the Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition was unveiled today at the NAB Show, the annual trade show of the National Association of Broadcasters.

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. 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 GB. Organizations now have the ability to switch vendors, if needed, and migrate existing data to their technology of choice.

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.”

In addition to every feature included in the Spectra TFinity tape library, the new TFinity ExaScale Edition provides an unparalleled feature set, unique to this product, including:

• Rational Robotics
  • High Performance Transporter
  • Improved TeraPorter
  • Dual Robot operations
  • New parallel AC power input
  • SlotIQ
  • MediaIQ
  • LogIQ
• Tri-media capable – Exclusive to Spectra Logic, the tri-media feature allows migration or integration of existing T10000D media and drives.
• Cold Storage – Debuting with TFinity ExaScale Edition, groups can now 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
• Most floor space efficient footprint of any tape library
• Most flexible service offerings, world-wide

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

“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.”

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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Source: Spectra Logic