By: Sarah Clews, WW Product Marketing Manager, Backup, Recovery and Archive (BURA), HPE Storage

Brian Grainger, CSO, Spectra Logic

In November 2016, Spectra Logic and HPE announced a new partnership – with the news that HPE will resell Spectra Logic’s enterprise-level Tape libraries, the HPE T950 and the HPE TFinity® ExaScale Edition. By combining forces, HPE and Spectra provide the market with reliable and affordable enterprise tape storage solutions that address all of the requirements of customers who are managing extremely large data sets – often in HPC environments.

Since data archiving is rarely at the top of the “exciting projects” list for IT professionals, the search for archiving solutions can often be a low priority. However, when an organization is generating large amounts of business-critical data, from petabytes to exabytes in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments, archiving should be a necessity. Preserving and maintaining access to data allows users to yield innovative scientific insights, solve complex equations, or effectively serve customers while growing their businesses. Archives are no longer where data goes to repose; instead, archives should be seen as the place where data goes to live, by preserving an organization’s ability to extract value from those archived data sets even as they continue to expand exponentially.

Long-Term Retention and Legal Compliance

Rapidly growing market segments – such as video surveillance and the Internet of Things (IoT), and industry verticals including government, academia, environmental research and healthcare pharmaceuticals – are generating growing data sets that demand the need for affordable and reliable archival storage. Another driver for data archiving is burgeoning legal compliances and retention requirements, many of which stretch decades into the future. These legal requirements significantly impact businesses because the cost to manage these new streams of data can be expensive for many organizations.

The great news is that HPE together with Spectra make archiving easier to manage and more economical, regardless of the amount of data that is being archived. This frees up valuable time and resources so that you can focus on other projects – with the comfort of knowing that reliable and fast access to valuable assets is at hand. On top of that, these enterprise storage solutions provide up to a 50% improvement in data center floor space utilization, freeing up physical space to devote to other projects.

Scalability and Features to Match a Growing High Performance Compute (HPC) Market

IDC reported HPC purchases $11.4B at the end of 2015, with storage being the fastest growing segment measured at ~4.7BN and potential to grow +9.4% CAGR by 2019. HPE has captured the leadership position in this aggressively growing market and continues to address the Big Compute–Big Data convergence through partnerships with vendors such as Spectra Logic and SGI (recently acquired), with an expanding lineup of server and storage offerings for the related HPC, deep machine learning, and emerging IoT markets.

The innovation that the HPE T950 and Hpe Tfinity Exascale Edition tape offerings bring, resonate with Big Data and HPC customers because they deliver extreme power efficiency, exceptional reliability and the greatest density available in the marketplace today.

If you’re an HPC customer with difficult-to-manage, antagonistic data growth, help is at hand! The HPE T950 can expand to up to 120 drives and over 10,000 media slots, storing over 190PB* of compressed enterprise data, meaning the HPE T950 offers the best total cost of ownership of any Tape Library solution. Or alternatively, for customers who require capacity to stretch beyond 1EB1 the HPE TFinity ExaScale Edition tape library offers the highest storage capacity with the smallest data center footprint in the world – providing up to a 50% reduction in data center floor space versus competing offerings. The HPE TFinity ExaScale tape library also offers high-performance dual robotics and can support either LTO tape technology or TS11x0 tape technology, to provide customers with the flexibility and choice of media vendor to deliver economical and long-term data retention to protect their valuable technology investment.

Patented Technology

Flexibility and space savings in both libraries are further enhanced with patented TeraPack® architecture. HPE Certified TeraPack Media simplifies the media management process, by stacking tape cartridges vertically in the library rather than horizontally, as seen in other libraries, allowing the HPE libraries to utilize 20-to-50% less floor space than other tape libraries. Each TeraPack holds 10-LTO tapes or 9-IBM® TS11X0 tapes, which also makes for easy bulk import and export.

Designed for Active Archives

Another benefit for HPE tape library users is the ability to save time managing their tape library, while eliminating the need for additional resources. The BlueScale® software interface, included with both the HPE T950 and TFinity ExaScale tape libraries, allows users to manage the library, configurations, partitions, encryption keys, as well as the library hardware and media, via health monitoring. This is easily accomplished through the use of the library’s touchscreen or remote web access from a web browser. BlueScale software also provides robust reliability with its complete lifecycle management tools. The tape libraries track and report on the expected lifetime utilization thresholds for tape, media, drives, and library components. Advanced notification that the lifecycle management provides will alert users to potential concerns before they become an operational issue, which is critical when managing valuable data.

Save Money with Intelligent, Power Efficient Storage

The HPE TFinity ExaScale Edition tape library can also substantially lower customers’ day-to-day power requirements and help to reduce environmental footprint. Some alternative solutions can use up to five times more energy to store an equivalent amount of data. Customers can also benefit from substantial savings in energy efficiency, producing significant improvements in TCO. This is possible because unlike any other tape libraries with multiple servers and appliances, the HPE TFinity ExaScale Edition tape library offers built-in BlueScale software, meaning no extra external servers, power, cooling or service is necessary.

These enterprise tape solutions are already making mission-critical data more accessible at leading institutions around the world.

This new partnership between HPE and Spectra Logic will enable more organizations to respond to the increasingly complex dynamics of the HPC market – so you can retain data for longer and for less.

Find out more about the two new tape library offerings:
HPE T950 Tape Library
HPE TFinity ExaScale Edition Tape Library

*2.5:1 compression ratio using TS11x0 tape technology
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