History 2004: Removable RAIDs into Library from Spectra Logic

A 25-year-old company based in Colorado, Spectra Logic has only ever dealt with tape libraries, for which it announced the shipment of a total of 17,000 units, although it has remained a relatively small company with only 250 employees and annual sales of $50 to $60 million.

And yet here it is about to venture into disk subsystems, still for backup, with the Spectra RXT (Raid eXchangeable Terapack). In fact, it has designed an interchangeable closed pack, the RXT, at 4.64×2.43×10.14 inches, a drawer that contains either 6x or 12×2.5-inch Fujitsu 80GB SATA HDDs positioned horizontally (3 columns of 4 disks) or 2x400GB 3.5-inch rotating devices, for a raw capacity that varies between 480GB to 960GB. The pack, at 12lbs with media, is the same size as that used by Spectra Logic for its tape media (LTO, SAIT, SDLT or AIT-4), so that they can be inserted in Spectra T950 libraries, while remaining interchangeable.

The robotics are capable of taking hold of the disk pack, and conveying it into a 5.25-inch form factor SCSI docking station with a special connector (and power source), the RXT “drive,” which holds the RAID controller (-0,-1 or -5), in the place of a tape drive.

The data are written on the disks in tape format. The disk drives do not spin when they are not in use.

In the same library that holds the 2 devices for insertion or release of packs, one can eventually mix tapes and disks, with a total of up to 95 interchangeable modules.

This translates to a removable RAID subsystem, rather than a removable HDD device. The time to load the pack is roughly 5s.

This library should be manageable with standard backup software, and is offered with a 2Gb/s FC or Ethernet connection with a 1Gb/s dual port, as well as a TCP/IP offload engine (TOE) for iSCSI.

An RXT Spectra T950 library, expected to be available in January, was announced at a price of roughly €100,000 with 2 LTO and 2 RXT drives, with maximum capacity of 90TB on disk (95 TeraPacks). For a total configuration at 200TB, with 90% on tape and 20% on disk, we get pretty close to €400,000. The 12×2.5-inch HDD pack (960GB) is worth €5,000, while that for 2×3.5-inch HDDs (800GB) is at €1,900.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 203 on December 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.