Spectra Logic Joins The Active Archive Alliance As A Founding Member

Spectra Logic, celebrating 30 years of data storage innovation, announced recently that it has joined the Active Archive Alliance as a founding member. The Active Archive Alliance is a non-profit storage industry association dedicated to promoting active archives for simplified, online access to all archived data.

Organizations are archiving increasing amounts of data as they grapple with data growth, retention compliance rules and the need to leverage the knowledge and information within their organization. As organizations archive more data, the challenge of accessing that data when needed has intensified. Active archive solutions resolve this issue by turning offline archives into visible, accessible extensions of online storage systems – enabling fast, easy access to archived data.

The industry trend toward active archiving is being enabled and accelerated by recent advancements in active archive applications as well as archive tape and disk storage technologies. Today's innovative active archive applications provide the ability to see and access data on tape through a file system interface, making it easy and affordable to view and search archived data files in large heterogeneous online active tape and disk storage pools.

"Today's tape technologies incorporate a decade of significant innovations that make tape libraries the ideal storage solution for active archiving," said Molly Rector, vice president of marketing and product management for Spectra Logic, a founding member of the Active Archive Alliance. "Spectra Logic's modern, intelligent tape libraries in combination with the latest active archive applications deliver the affordability of tape as the right online file system archive storage medium."

For years Spectra Logic has led the industry in delivering active archiving capabilities to large broadcast organizations and high-performance computing (HPC) labs, which used proprietary applications for online access to data archived on Spectra tape libraries. With the emergence of open systems applications that leverage tape and disk for the file archive storage, the benefits of tape-based active archives are now available to all organizations, no matter their size.

Spectra Logic's T-Series tape libraries are uniquely suited for active archive environments of all sizes. Spectra Logic tape libraries meet all the storage requirements for active archiving, including providing power efficiency, high density, reliability, low cost, fast access times and the ability to integrate easily with the archive management applications that enable simplified access to the archived data. Key features of Spectra Logic tape libraries include:

• High Performance: Fast throughput capabilities of 24.2 TB/hour on a single frame, with linear scalability to multiple frames and dual robots supporting high tape exchange rates, providing fast data search and file retrieval.
• High Density: Storage of about 72 TB of data per square foot of floor space, providing up to 70 percent higher density than competitive offerings. (1)
• Scalability: Almost 200 percent more capacity and slots in a single library than leading competitors,(2) Spectra's T-Finity scales to more than 30,000 slots in a single library and 120,000 slots in a single library complex. It can scale capacity by adding frames non-disruptively, requiring no library downtime.
• High Reliability: All Spectra T-Series libraries offer complete Media Lifecycle Management to ensure tape media reliability by identifying over-used or damaged media so data can be copied to new media. T-Series also has built-in Media Verification systems that are critical in active archive environments to verify the data integrity immediately after written onto tape and for years into the future after the initial write to tape. Additionally, for high availability needs, the T-Finity 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.
• Power Efficiency: Extremely efficient, Spectra's tape libraries require as little as 20 percent of the power per unit of data stored as competitive offerings demand, minimizing power and cooling costs. (3)

"With data demands increasing exponentially across multiple industries, tape library systems continue to play an important role in long-term data management, within and beyond high performance computing markets," said Addison Snell, CEO of InterSect360 Research. "Active archives will create an increasing demand for high-density, high-performance tape platforms that run efficiently and reliably. Spectra Logic continues to focus its technology innovations on providing innovative active storage solutions and should see an opportunity to expand its presence as an important component of today's active archives." For the InterSect 360 active archive white paper, "Active Archives Help Organizations See What They Already Knew." http://www.activearchive.com/

Spectra Logic's tape library products are compatible with all major active archive applications and software packages, including Atempo Time Navigator, CommVault File Migrator, SGI Data Migration Facility (DMF), FileTek StorHouse, IBM HPSS, QStar Archive Management, Quantum StorNext, Symantec File System Extender and XenData Archive Series.

Active archiving eliminates the typical trade-off between keeping data visible in online disk arrays and moving the data to more cost-effective near-line or off-line tape. It enables organizations to keep all archive data online, searchable and quickly accessible, while ensuring media and data integrity and simplified management.

"The adoption of active archiving is accelerating as enterprises recognize the benefit of storing fixed content data – which represents the majority of data – more cost efficiently, with quick and continuous access to the data for ongoing business purposes," said David G. Hill, founder and principal, Mesabi Group LLC. "Tape libraries paired with file system interface software make active archiving even more cost efficient while at the same time providing a combination that has the necessary speed, administrator control and "green" benefits of reduced power and cooling requirements."

In addition to Spectra Logic, founding technology members of the Active Archive Alliance include Compellent Technologies, FileTek, Inc., and QStar Technologies.

The mission of the Active Archive Alliance is to provide organizations with the best practices, tools and information they need to achieve simplified access to the online storage of their archived data. For more information visit www.activearchive.com .

(1)The T-Finity library delivers 72 TB/sq ft, and is 40 to 70 percent more dense than competing libraries, which store 40 to 42 TB/sq ft.

(2)A single T-Finity library unit scales to more than 30,000 slots, more than twice the size of the next largest library—the Sun/STK SL8500—at 10,088 slots in a single library.

(3)The typical power usage of the T-Finity for operation plus heat dissipation is 0.7 watts/TB stored, less than 20% that of competing libraries, which can utilize up to 3.9 watts/TB. Assumes maximum slot configurations with twelve drives.

About Spectra Logic Corporation
At Spectra Logic we define, design and deliver innovative data protection through tape, deduplication and disk-based backup, recovery and archive storage solutions. By igniting innovation we challenge expectations of the data protection market with intelligent, integrated, and simple to use backup and archive technologies. Throughout our 30-year history we have delivered high-density, feature rich storage with unmatched service and support to customers worldwide. For more information, visit www.SpectraLogic.com.

About the Active Archive Alliance
The Active Archive Alliance is a collaborative industry alliance dedicated to romoting active archives for simplified, online access to all archived data. Launched in early 2010 by founding technology partners, Compellent, FileTek, Inc., QStar Technologies and Spectra Logic Corporation, the Active Archive Alliance is a vendor neutral organization open to leading providers of active archive technologies including file systems, active archive applications, cloud storage, and high density tape and disk storage, as well as individuals and end-users. Active Archive Alliance members provide active archive solutions, best practices, and industry testimonials so that organizations can achieve fast, online access to all their data in the most cost effective manner. For more information visit www.activearchive.com.