Spectra Logic introduces T-Finity the industry's largest and most efficient Enterprise tape library.

Celebrating 30 years of data storage innovation, Spectra Logic today announced the industry’s most advanced enterprise tape library that meets demanding archive and backup requirements while saving customers up to 30 percent on initial capital investments and 15 to 20 percent on annual recurring operational expenses. The Spectra T-Finity library offers multiple, redundant robots, scaling to more than 45 petabytes in a single library and to more than 180 petabytes in a single, unified library complex. The T-Finity is targeted for use in data-intensive environments such as large enterprise IT, government, high performance computing (HPC) and broadcast, media and entertainment.

“With escalating data volumes and retention requirements, organisations need large archive and backup solutions that ensure long-term data access. The Spectra T-Finity provides superior capacity and stored data access, and its modern design resets expectations on the economic savings achievable with tape storage solutions,” said Nathan Thompson, Spectra Logic’s CEO and founder. “The T-Finity library enables customers to consolidate multiple legacy libraries, reduce initial capital investments, control ongoing operational expense, and ensure investment protection with scalability to meet long-term data growth requirements.”

T-Finity provides high availability for 24x7x365 operations, the highest storage density available on the market, and high-speed performance to handle sustained high transaction volumes. These capabilities meet the needs of demanding backup environments, and are key for the growing number of organisations archiving high volume, media-rich data such as research, bio-tech, oil and gas, seismic imaging, surveillance video, broadcast, media and entertainment, video content and financial applications. And with support for industry-leading LTO open tape technology and IBM System Storage™ TS1130 tape drives, the Spectra T-Finity enables customers to select their preferred enterprise tape option.

Product Highlights:

Spectra Logic's T-Finity delivers enterprise tape library advancements based on a modern design that saves cost while increasing confidence in data integrity and availability on tape:

• Highest Density: At 72 terabytes per square foot, the T-Finity provides up to 70 percent higher density than competitive offerings.

• Most Scalable: Almost 200 percent more capacity and slots in a single library than leading competitors, the T-Finity scales to more than 30,000 slots in a single library and 120,000 slots in a single library complex. It scales capacity by adding frames non-disruptively, requiring no library downtime.

• High Availability Hardware: Delivers up to four nines (99.99%) availability through dual robotics, redundant control and communication paths, and multiple redundant components that increase uptime and support high exchange rate workloads.

• Confidence in Data Availability: Spectra's Lifecycle Management includes proactive library, tape drive and media lifecycle management and reporting to ensure high availability and data integrity. No other library on the market offers this complete environmental and data health intelligence.

• Most Power Efficient: Extremely efficient, the T-Finity tape library uses half or less of the power per unit of data stored as competitive offerings, minimising power and cooling costs.

• Integrated Data Encryption and Key Management: Spectra's data encryption enables organisations to secure data and reduce the cost of regulatory compliance.

• Unified Management: As the only enterprise-class library with a single management interface, the T-Finity uses Spectra’s BlueScale™ software to simplify administration, configuration, hot upgrades, security and local and remote reporting.

The Spectra T-Finity's many 'built-in' features include: integrated data encryption; library virtualisation and partitioning; and hardware, media and library management software – all included at no additional cost. Competitive offerings charge extra for these capabilities and require separate servers – increasing hardware, space, power, cooling, support contract and personnel management costs.

Pricing and availability.
The Spectra T-Finity tape library will begin shipping in December 2009. List pricing for the Spectra T-Finity, including two LTO4 fibre channel drives, two robots, encryption, Spectra library lifecycle management and BlueScale management software, starts at £146,995.