Tape Lifecycle Management Introduced by Spectra Logic

Spectra Logic’s new Media Lifecycle Management (MLM) will change how users view tape backup environments.  MLM’s advanced monitoring and reporting provides the high level of visibility into the health of tape media that is already expected for disk media.  Backup failures are significantly reduced through proactive monitoring and advanced reporting that allows storage administrators to replace media, prior to failures, as usage thresholds are reached.

MLM is a combination of intelligent, certified LTO media and Spectra BlueScale software that provides advanced media tracking and reporting for the life of a tape. Users can now know tapes inside and out by tracking more than 30 pieces of information about individual media. MLM information is linked to the barcode but also permanently stored on the medium auxiliary memory chip (MAM) of the LTO tape, and will remain accessible even if the barcode is compromised.  Library administrators are proactively notified to remove tapes with high error rates to mitigate the risk of data corruption.

"MLM changes the playing field for secondary storage, as it makes tape as reliable as disk," noted Matt Starr, CTO of Spectra Logic. "Tape continues to thrive in the data center and MLM opens new visibility into the backup and archive environment to continue to increase efficiency and data availability."

MLM will be offered free of charge to all T-series library users. MLM will begin shipping in April 2008 as a part of the Spectra BlueScale 10.2 software release in its T-Series tape libraries. Information such as: born-on date, number of reads and writes, error rate, media quality, date of last access, application usage, encryption information, cleaning log and remaining capacity are tracked. MLM and BlueScale are compatible with all major backup applications, including: BakBone, CA, CommVault, EMC, IBM Tivoli, Symantec and Syncsort.

                           
Spectra Logic