11 December 2018

Spectra Logic has integrated what is being described as the industry’s “most advanced” tape technology, the IBM TS1160, in its enterprise-class tape libraries.

As well as the TFinity library, Spectra's T series will also support the TS1160 tape drives and media

The vendor’s TFinity ExaScale, T950, T950v and T380 libraries will support the new tape drive and media.

When fully populated with the TS1160, Spectra says its TFinity ExaScale will store and allow access to more than 2EB (2,000 petabytes) of data. The vendor claims this makes the TFinity ExaScale the largest single data storage machine in the world.

Spectra adds that the TS1160 tape drive and media provides a number of technological breakthroughs over the TS1155.

It says storage capacity is expanded to an “unprecedented” 20TB per cartridge (uncompressed), data throughput is increased to 400MB per second (uncompressed), and it delivers twice the Fibre Channel interface speed at 16Gbps or up to 25Gbps Ethernet.

Spectra CEO Nathan Thompson says: “To achieve this level of technological advancement, a new custom ASIC chip was developed by IBM; one that will be used in future generations of TS and LTO enterprise tape technologies, including LTO-9. Ongoing engineering feats such as these underscore the value and longevity of tape technology.”

The company continues by saying that the upcoming JE tape cartridge which works with the TS1160 is engineered with aligned Barium Ferrite (BaFe) particles that provide better signal-to-noise ratios, enabling a native storage capacity of 20TB per cartridge.

Furthermore, the same advanced Tunnelling Magneto-Resistive (TMR) head used to achieve higher capacities and speeds in the TS1155 and LTO-8 drives are also being used for the TS1160.

Spectra adds that the new tape offerings are designed to read and write media formatted by the TS1155 and TS1150 drives and read tapes formatted by drives older than two generations.