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Spectra Logic: Taking Tape To Infinity: Page 2 of 5

But that was then, and this is now. The two biggest names that Spectra Logic sees in the tape library business today are IBM and Quantum. A smaller company, Overland Storage, is twisting in the economic winds. StorageTek could be considered as another big name, but the company has fallen upon hard times since it was acquired by Sun (which is, itself, about to be acquired). Yet Sun's StorageTek is the only other vendor that really plays at the high end enterprise space.

With the advent of its T-Finity solution, Spectra Logic has launched itself into the high-end enterprise tape library space, well beyond 10 petabyte (PB) infrastructures. Note, however, that Spectra Logic has already established itself across a broad swatch across mid-market and enterprise-class tape library space, and that T-Finity simply builds on existing proven architectural components for the most part, extending them without bringing any additional risk to the table.  

The most eye-popping number Spectra Logic notes about T-Finity is that the technology can scale to 180 PB (Capacity and performance figures are based on LTO-5). Quite frankly, no one today needs 180 PB of tape media, but what that number says is that while the library is technically finite, from a customer perspective, it may as well be infinite. Customers can continue to add modularly to the same T-Finity library complex for years with all the data remaining accessible within the same system.  

Let's look at more realistic numbers. Spectra Logic feels that there are a number of customers in the 30 to 50 PB range. That leaves only one competitor: Sun StorageTek's SL8500, which maxes out at 106 PB. By comparison, IBM's TS3500 tape library currently maxes out at 10.3 PB. 

That may be all well and good, but who would possibly want that much tape? Although tape usage is generally considered to be horizontal across all industries, some vertical markets command attention, notably high performance computing, media and entertainment, government and healthcare. But what do these companies need all that data for? The answer is not backup. Yes, backup will still be an important application, but that is not what is driving increasing consideration and acceptance of tape storage. The answer is active archiving.