NAB: Spectra Logic Enhanced Stack Through Spectra T950 Tape Libraries With Swarm Solution

Spectra Logic Corp. announced several tape enhancements to its family of tape libraries that help end users simplify and enhance their workflows.

Stack Tape Library

The company offers Spectra Swarm, which adds Ethernet connectivity to its LTO tape libraries. It makes tape connectivity easier and adds an interface to LTO tape libraries by leveraging all of the same infrastructure and networking capabilities as the rest of the equipment in a data centre. Swarm is tested and qualified to work with the firm’s LTO tape libraries – Spectra Stack through Spectra T950.

T950 Tape Library

While FC continues to be available across all the company’s tape libraries, it is frequently being obsoleted in data centres. SAS tape drives, and in particular half-height SAS drives, provide cost savings, allowing the addition of more drives for the same price, but SAS is not normally viable for connections beyond a single rack. Swarm solves that problem by utilising a backbone 40GbE RoCE or iSCSI connection that is then locally switched to multiple SAS-connected LTO drives.

Spectra Swarm benefits:

• Enables cost savings due to the ability to use lower-cost SAS half-height tape drives

• Eliminates the need for FC with the conversion to a standard Ethernet backbone

• Delivers faster tape library performance with the addition of more tape drives for the price

For users needing extra data security, the Stack tape library now provides end users with more protection with built-in BlueScale encryption and key management. This encryption feature enables Stack customers to protect their data through the same key management as the company’s other enterprise tape libraries. All Stack tape libraries come with standard encryption, which allows all tapes in a library to be encrypted automatically. This feature can be added to any existing Stack library with a free code upgrade. Tapes that were encrypted on any other Spectra tape library using BlueScale standard encryption can also be imported into a Stack and used.

For users with immense storage needs, the company provides the IBM TS1160 drive and JE media, for use in TFinity ExaScale tape library. When populated with the TS1160 tape drives and media, a TFinity ExaScale will store and allow access to more than 2EB of compressed ^(*) data, making this tape library the largest single storage machine.

Spectra Swarm will be available in July.

“With the unprecedented growth of data and the need to keep it indefinitely, Spectra continues to invest in tape technology, including making tape connectivity easy,” said Matt Ninesling, director, tape engineering, Spectra Logic. “The world’s use of data continues to evolve and we’re working to ensure that tape storage, with all of its economic, capacity and performance benefits, advances with it.“

^(*) Compression ratio is 2.5:1