Flexible Growth and Performance
Adding capacity to your T950 is simple with Capacity on Demand (CoD). Start with as few as 90 enterprise slots or 100 LTO slots, and as your needs expand, add more capacity in increments of 9 enterprise tape slots or 10 LTO tape slots, up to 7,614 enterprise slots or 10,020 LTO slots. Spectra makes it easy by shipping every library fully populated, allowing you to add slots with a simple software key, significantly reducing the time needed to upgrade your library.
The Spectra T950 utilizes a custom, 10-tape TeraPack with an LTO media container or a 9-tape TeraPack for TS1160 for input/output operations.
The TeraPack container provides a more efficient way to import tape media into the library and offers a clean, secure and stackable case for staging and storing media outside of the library. Using the unique patented TeraPack reduces handling time by 90%.
Adding tape drives and increasing performance is simple with easy-to-configure slide-in drives. Starting with as few as two drives, and the ability to increase to 120 drives, this scalability protects your investment and ensures that your Spectra tape library is upgradable with the latest in technological advances.
At the same time, the library’s identity to the wider network and its configuration data travel with it to the larger enclosure. This preserves both your initial investment in the library and the time already spent fine-tuning the library’s configuration.
Enhance with Partitioning
Shared Library Services (SLS) lets you implement simple, integrated partitioning so that the T950 library appears to users as multiple libraries. Unlike other partitioning solutions that involve complicated and expensive external partitioning servers, network connections, and proprietary client software, you can easily partition your library using its built-in BlueScale interface.
Incremental Scalability and Performance
Every Spectra T950 ships with all of the tape slots installed. You can enable tape slots as you need them with a simple software key activation. Based on your data storage growth needs, more capacity or performance can be easily added. Purchase more drives and slots, and let the library grow with your data. Once your data has grown to the limits of your initial configuration, just add an expansion frame to keep growing. The T950 can expand all the way to 120 drives and 10,020 LTO slots or 7,614 enterprise slots in eight frames.
LTO Tape Technology Grows with You
The T950 leverages LTO (Linear Tape Open), the only open format tape technology available. You can rest easy knowing that each generation of LTO is backward compatible – with a vigorous roadmap extending to LTO-12 and beyond, so you have peace of mind that your tape technology format is here to stay.
Today’s LTO-9 provides up to 45TB of compressed* capacity on each data cartridge (18TB native).
IBM TS11XX Technology
IBM’s TS11XX Tape Technology offers the most reliable tape technology ever developed. Designed to provide enterprise-class reliability with 24 x 7 usage, the TS11XX tape drives provide 100 times more data integrity than an LTO tape drive. In addition to robust reliability and data integrity, the TS11XX Technology provides the highest capacity per tape and the fastest native data transfer rate of any tape technology. TS1160 reaches 20TB native capacity and can reach 50TB per tape with compression.
Ease of Installation
Dual AC
The Dual AC two-power unit enables data centers that wish to provide AC power redundancy to their T950 to do so using out-of-phase power. This enhancement provides installation flexibility, reduces installation costs, speeds up installation time and provides power redundancy.
Power Distribution Unit
The Spectra Power Distribution Unit (PDU) enables customers to easily power their multi-frame T950 with Delta or Wye-configured three-phase power. The Spectra multiframe PDU supports an optional web-enabled power meter for monitoring and balancing the power load across library frames.
TranScale
When your data storage growth outpaces your T950’s capacity, upgrading is EASY and FAST—you can switch between models quickly. The Spectra TranScale architecture eliminates the need for realignment, host/server reconfiguration, worldwide name changes and switch rezoning.
Designed with your data storage growth in mind, the T950 tape library has been developed to preserve your initial investment in storage by providing a solution that addresses both your short-term and long-term storage needs. When your storage requires more slots than your library’s current capacity, there’s no need to buy a whole new library. By investing in a Spectra T950 tape library all you need to do is add more frames (up to eight).
Preserve your Storage Investment
As you grow, you continue to use your original tape drives, power supplies, TeraPacks and media in your new library. TranScale provides a cost-effective lifetime investment in storage, allowing you to scale your hardware and software to make your capacity upgrades quick, seamless and economical.
With TranScale, you can effortlessly upgrade to a larger Spectra library as your needs grow. Spectra’s TranScale data storage growth path allows you to expand to a larger library with the same interface and features—but with more capacity and performance. Component interchange is at the core of TranScaling. Parts that can be TranScaled include:
- Power supplies
- Library Control Module (LCM)
- Interface Controller
- Drives
- Cables
- Tapes
*2.5:1 Compression
