Ohio State Relies on Spectra Logic’s T380 for Asset Management Needs

Ohio State University’s Office of University Communications has implemented a Spectra T380 tape library with BlueScale 11 software from Spectra Logic.  The tape library is being used to back up 50TB of creative and varied media-rich data such as HD videos for public service announcements (PSAs), TV and scoreboard shots, and student recruitment. Ohio State University was one of the first customers to upgrade to Spectra’s BlueScale 11 software when it was released in May 2010.

With the addition of the T380 the University was able to meet its budget and increase its storage management efficiency while supporting “green” IT initiatives and reducing costly space requirements.

“BlueScale 11 offers reliability and backup performance improvements, and lets us take advantage of new enhancements such as Library Lifecycle Management and the BlueScale Vision camera to proactively identify and rectify potential issues and eliminate downtime,” saiysWayne Tolliver, systems manager for University Communications.  “Its cutting-edge innovation enables data verification and reliability features that are comparable to—if not more advanced—than any disk-based backup solution.”

BlueScale 11 is Spectra’s latest version of its proprietary tape library storage management software.  New features include ScanTape capability that scans tapes before and after they are written, thus verifying the health of the disk and the data integrity.  The Global Spare Drive option is a ‘hot-spare’ drive for tape libraries and enables easy, remote failover of a drive for continuous operations in the event of a tape drive failure.

“BlueScale 11 combines innovation and verified data integrity with features like MLM ScanTape, which confirms that a tape cartridge is ready for reading and writing, and that stored data has been reliably written and can be read from tape,” says Matt Starr, Spectra Logic CTO. “MLM ScanTape improves system reliability, availability and data integrity by proactively monitoring and reporting media health statistics and system configuration usage. Since MLM ScanTape uses a Global Spare Drive, customers’ data integrity is further validated since the non-writing drive verifies the tape data independently of the drive which wrote the data to tape.”

“The T380 incorporates the latest tape technology and offers long-term investment protection through its ability to scale and meet our projected data growth during the next five years,” Tolliver added.

Along with its Spectra T380, the University uses Time Navigator Enterprise Server and Digital Archive Server 3.1 from Atempo. To download a podcast interview with Wayne Tolliver, outlining OSU’s experiences with Spectra Logic, click here.