Spectra Logic Tape Library Capable of Storing 3.6 Exabytes
World's highest capacity storage system
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on November 16, 2011 at 3:00 pmSpectra Logic Corp. unveiled five new products that reset the bar in defining exascale storage.
As the computing industry has continually evolved over recent years in moving from petascale to exascale computing, demands on storage platforms have evolved dramatically.
Spectra Logic is introducing a suite of advancements that meet the feature set, capacity and performance needs of the new market of exascale storage. Spectra Logic is introducing the world’s highest capacity storage system as well as performance, reliability and data integrity advancements across its line of T-Series tape libraries. Spectra’s new exascale storage capabilities are designed to help organizations store and manage massive amounts of data.
"The ‘Big Data’ trend is driving technology requirements in applications ranging from enterprise data centers to academic supercomputing labs," said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research. "The next generation of exascale data will require capabilities that not only provide sufficient capacity, but also deliver the speed, reliability, and data integrity features to match the needs of these environments."
According to IDC, in 2011 the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1,800 exabytes, growing by a factor of 9 in just five years. Data creation in the world today is exponential but disk drive capacity growth is linear. Organizations are seeking exascale storage, which is defined as a storage system that is contiguously accessible and scalable to more than an exabyte of capacity. New data storage strategies built on highly scalable tape-based storage systems are necessary to offer the shift needed to meet these burgeoning data storage needs.
T-Finity ExaScale Storage Powered by BlueScale 12
Spectra Logic is introducing the world’s highest capacity storage system, the T-Finity enterprise tape library capable of storing more than 3.6 exabytes of data. Powered by Spectra’s BlueScale 12 software management, the Spectra T-Finity provides the highest capacity single library and the highest capacity library complex. A single T-Finity library will now expand to 40 frames for a capacity of up to 50,000 tape cartridges. In a library complex, up to eight libraries can be clustered using Spectra’s skyway technology for a capacity of up to 400,000 tape cartridges. The Spectra T-Finity with TeraPack media storage is designed for support of Redundant Arrays of Independent Tapes (RAIT) and provides enhanced performance, reliability and data integrity capabilities. With support for LTO and IBM TS1140 technology tape drives, the exascale-capacity T-Finity offers customers the flexibility to choose the right media type and capacity options to best meet their Big Data storage needs. Tape media options and corresponding native and compressed capacities are shown in the table below.
Spectra Logic’s unified management software, BlueScale 12, provides performance, management, and integration capabilities. With barcode scanning and motion code enhancements, BlueScale 12 delivers 35 to 60 percent faster robotic performance across Spectra’s enterprise and mid-range tape libraries, plus 15 to 20 times faster library ‘power on’ times. In addition, BlueScale 12 provides support for CarbideClean media, faster and improved GUI and SSL web certificates and delivers XML-based Open Library API to enable customers’ development groups to interface with the system for integration with their customized software management platforms.
BlueScale 12 is available on all Spectra T-Series tape libraries providing a common user interface across Spectra’s range of tape libraries from the entry-level T50e, distributed level T120, mid- range T200, T380 and T680, and enterprise scale T950 and T-Finity libraries.
Performance, Reliability
and Data Integrity Enhancements
In conjunction with its exascale-capacity T-Finity and BlueScale 12 announcements, Spectra Logic also unveiled four exascale tape storage and archiving advancements.
The advancements address storage requirements for exascale data storage – from the smallest, most minute elements to larger-scale capabilities, and include:
- CarbideClean, developed by Spectra Logic as an enhancement to its Certified Media offering. CarbideClean extends the life of tape media and drives by using a precision carbide blade to pre-clean media prior to shipment to customers for initial use. Spectra Logic considers CarbideClean a tape media best practice, and is offering it on all Spectra Certified Media as an additional value-add at no additional charge.
- Bulk TeraPack Access Port (TAP) system, which allows customers to import or export tapes 7x faster and more efficiently. With Spectra’s Bulk TAP system, users can import or export 500 TBs of data in minutes. Bulk TAP is an optional feature available on Spectra’s enterprise tape libraries – the T950 and T-Finity.
- Spectra Logic is extending its Media Lifecycle Management (MLM) capabilities and reliability to the IBM TS1140 technology tape drives, which are available with Spectra’s enterprise-class T-Finity tape libraries. Spectra’s MLM provides tape library reliability and data viability by tracking and proactively alerting customers to replace overused or damaged media. It also performs data integrity verification of the data on tape.
- TeraPack Optimized RAIT. Spectra Logic has teamed with the archive software developers, High Performance Storage System (HPSS), to provide improved management, handling, import, export and storage, as well as up to 2x faster tape mounts of RAIT sets. RAIT protects users from potential data loss similar to RAID capabilities, historically only offered with disk-based storage systems. TeraPack optimized RAIT from HPSS will begin testing in customer environments this month. The TeraPack is a patented Spectra Logic innovation that maintains a set of tapes with a unified barcode to deliver greater media management efficiencies both within and external to tape libraries.
"HPSS RAIT architecture significantly improves data reliability in high performance, big data environments," said Jason Alt, senior software engineer, National Center for Supercomputing Applications. "The innovation of RAIT enables customers to recover from a media failure without having to invest in full duplicate copies of all the data tapes."
"As today’s announcements exemplify, Spectra Logic has harnessed 32 years of innovation in electronics, robotics, data storage and software to expand the capacity and capabilities of our T-Series tape libraries to meet the needs of Big Data storage environments," said Matt Starr, chief technology officer, Spectra Logic. "We have addressed the unique challenges of exascale data storage – from ensuring the integrity of each bit of data on the media to delivering the highest capacity storage system on the market. Today’s announcements demonstrate Spectra Logic’s committed to innovation leadership and to delivering storage excellence for Big Data environments."
Comments
The idea of Redundant Arrays of Independent Tapes or RAIT is very old
with the simple idea to apply RAID technology to tapes.
We discovered
the first one from Data General in 1992. Another company,
Storage Dimensions, implemented it into software with Cheyenne and
CA in 1995 for DAT, 8mm and DLT. Digital Interface reveals in 1997 the
T40, a tape array controller. Data General comes back in this field in
1999 with Ultera, a specialist of RAIT that also premiered a CD-R array
controller. Land-5 was also involved in this field at about the same
time. In 2001 StorageTek planned also a tape array that never happens.
There was also several other attempts in this technology. Compaq
introduced the StorageWorks DLT Tape Array III, a 5U rackmountable
enclosure that housed up to four DLT or SDLT tape drives. The company
also revealed another one for AIT with up to five tape drives, and
another one for DAT 160. HP offered the SCSI Tape Array 5300, a 3U rack
enclosure holding daisy-chained drives: two full-height array, four
half-height modules, or one full height and two half-height modules with
LTO-4 and 4mm DAT. Shalstaff currently proposes for duplication the
QuickTape Array-40 that makes any two tape drives an array capable of
striping, mirroring, cascading, and off-line copy. But all these
products remain confidential.
RAID is very popular in the storage industry. Why RAIT never happens?
In a tape autoloader or library, if the data are positioned on several
cartridges, there is a problem of removability. You cannot extract one
of them to put it outside in another secure place. You have to transport
together all the media involved in the array and keep them in the same
box. If you lose one or two cartridges depending on the RAIT level, data cannot be recovered. It's less
risky in a big archiving library where you are supposed to never touch
the media.
Another difficulty: when you write in parallel on several tapes, you
have to be sure that all cartridges concerned are in excellent shape. If
one them encounters a problem, the drive generally tries to write on
another part of the tape. It takes time and the entire process can be
drastically slowed down. Advantage here is, like in a disk array, the
system continues to work if a tape drive fails or if a tape is not usable at all.
Furthermore, there is the possibility to lose capacities if the RAIT is partially used.
HPSS, used by Spectra Logic is a
software managing petabytes of data on disk and robotic tape libraries,
is an IBM technology, in collaboration among five US Department of Energy laboratories, based on RAID-6 to an array of 6 tape drives in a
4+2 configuration. In a white paper, from HPPS, you can read:" The HPSS
system currently implements a multiple stripe solution (up to 16 tapes
wide) that includes mounting a volume group from a pool of tape devices,
concurrent transfer from application to tape devices, write recovery by
mounting new volume group, read recovery using multiple copies, and the
ability to repack a volume group to reclaim empty space on a volume.
The HPSS RAIT architecture extends this multiple stripe solution to
include parity generation, parity storage, and data recovery. The
striped mirror read reliability features also help RAIT. Currently, if a
drive fails during a striped read operation on a tape group that has a
mirror, HPSS dismounts the current set and repositions to the same
segment and can continue the operation."
Spectra Logic uses TeraPack cases, each holding up to ten tape cartridges.
VTL, based on much secure and faster disk arrays, and can be connected
to a tape library without the need of RAIT for just archiving. We suppose that
poor access times on tape and into robotics cannot be really diminish
with an array, but transfer rate, already acceptable, can probably be accelerated .
The highest capacity (with compression) tape libraries that we know is
the Oracle StreamLine 8500 library filled with 100,000 cartridges for a
capacity of 1EB and the IBM TS3500 robotic with 2.7EB. The new Logic
T-Finity models reach 3.6EB with IBM TS1140 cartridges and will reach
3.2EB with 400,800 slots containing LTO-6 cartridges when they will be
on the market (estimated availability in 2H12 for he Spectra Logic),
into 40-frame eight libraries.
Taking into consideration the projection of IDC that the amount of
information created and replicated will be 1,800 exabytes in 2011, this
massive capacity could be stored in exactly 500 high-end clustered
T-Finity units or in just a building.
Subscribe to our free daily newsletter
