Spectra Logic unveils the world’s largest capacity tape library

Spectra Logic has  announced Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition, the world’s largest tape storage system. Designed to address the needs of organisations with exponential data growth, such as media and entertainment, high performance computing and traditional IT, the Spectra TFinity ExaScale Edition was unveiled at the NAB Show.

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 StorageTekT10000D, 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. Organisations 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.”

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 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.