Tennis Channel Selects Spectra Logic T950 LTO Tape Library (6/950)

Spectra Logic announced that Tennis Channel, the only 24-hour, television-based multimedia destination dedicated to both the professional sport and tennis lifestyle, recently selected a Spectra T950 robotic tape library with six LTO-4 drives and 950 activated slots to store and protect 50TB, or 946 hours of video footage. With Spectra Logic, Tennis Channel now has a storage platform that automates tape handling and supports growing backup data sets at much faster speeds.

"We chose Spectra Logic over competing data tape libraries due to its known reliability, ease in adding slots and drives, strong customer service reputation and reasonable pricing," said Dean Hadaegh, chief technology officer and senior vice president of technical operations for Tennis Channel. "Our previous single-drive archival storage was too slow and did not offer adequate capacity or room for growth. Spectra Logic helps us meet our nine-hour backup window, and the removable TeraPacks make it easy to rotate data offsite for archival as needed."

Tennis Channel partitions the Spectra T950 into two virtual tape libraries, and conducts a full backup on weekends, with incremental backups on weekdays. The first, enterprise partition uses Symantec to backup the Windows environment including all servers and the share drives using the two LTO-4 drives. The second XSAN partition uses BakBone NetVault software to back up Apple environment data, including all the data in the edit bays for production, promo and the graphic department using four LTO-4 drives.

"Through listening to our customers we have identified their needs and created products that are easy to use, flexible and scalable in architecture," said Hossein ZiaShakeri, Spectra Logic’s senior vice president of business development and strategic alliances. "We have also developed strong partnerships with key industry organizations to ensure seamless and proven end-to-end storage archive solutions for media and entertainment users."