Spectra Logic’s T-Finity Earns Award at Storage Visions Conference

Spectra Logic’s T-Finity enterprise tape library was named Product of the Year in the Professional Media and Entertainment Storage category at the ninth annual Storage Visions Conference in Las Vegas earlier this month.

The Storage Visions Awards recognize companies that are advancing storage technologies utilized in consumer electronics, the media and entertainment industries, and visionary products for the digital content value chain.

At 72 terabytes per square foot, the T-Finity is recognized as the world’s highest-density tape library, and is targeted for use in data-intensive environments such as large enterprise IT, federal, high performance computing (HPC), and media/entertainment. 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.

“Spectra Logic continues to deliver on its commitment to the media and entertainment market,” says Hossein ZiaShakeri, SVP of strategic alliances and business development at Spectra Logic. “The Spectra T-Finity digital tape archive is uniquely suited to media and entertainment environments due to its scalability, unmatched ease of use, and extensive proactive monitoring capabilities that ensure constant uptime. We are honored to receive the 2010 Storage Visions award.”

The tape library boasts 99.99% availability through redundant dual robotics, redundant control and communication paths, and multiple redundant components that increase uptime and support high exchange rate workloads.

Spectra’s Lifecycle Management includes proactive library, tape drive, and media lifecycle management and reporting to ensure high availability and data integrity.  Additionally, Spectra’s ScanTape functionality verifies the health of tapes before writing data to them, and then verifies the data was successfully written to the tape. Spectra data encryption also enables organizations to secure data and reduce the cost of regulatory compliance.

According to Spectra, the T-Finity saves customers up to 30% on initial capital investment and 15-20% on annual recurring operational expenses. In addition, the T-Finity uses 50% less power per unit of data stored than most storage systems, minimizing power and cooling costs.

The list price for the Spectra T-Finity begins at $218,500, and includes two LTO-4 fibre channel drives, two robots, encryption, Spectra library lifecycle management and BlueScale management software.