Spectra Logic Corporation is a

computer data storage Computer data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data (computing), data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The central pro ...

company based in

Boulder, Colorado Boulder is a home rule city that is the county seat and most populous municipality of Boulder County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 108,250 at the 2020 United States census, making it the 12th most populous city in Color ...

in the United States. The company builds

backup In information technology, a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form, referring to the process of doing so, is "back up", w ...

and archive technology for

secondary storage Computer data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers. The central processing unit (CPU) of a computer ...

to protect data after it migrates from primary disk. Spectra Logic's primary product is

tape libraries In computer storage, a tape library, sometimes called a tape silo, tape robot or tape jukebox, is a storage device that contains one or more tape drives, a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader to identify tape cartridges a ...

. The company was founded in 1979, and is a

privately held company A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is ...

History

Nathan C. Thompson founded Spectra Logic in his apartment in 1979 while he was an engineering student at the

University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University of Colorado sys ...

. Thompson is the chairman and CEO of the company. The company became the first to automate

Advanced Intelligent Tape Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT) is a discontinued high-speed, high-capacity magnetic tape data storage format developed and controlled by Sony. It competed mainly against the DLT, LTO, DAT/DDS, and VXA formats. AIT uses a cassette similar to ...

(AIT) magnetic tape in a robotic autoloader (

tape library In computer storage, a tape library, sometimes called a tape silo, tape robot or tape jukebox, is a storage device that contains one or more tape drives, a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader to identify tape cartridges a ...

), and was also the first tape-library vendor to implement the

iSCSI Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI ( ) is an Internet Protocol-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. iSCSI provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP ...

networking protocol in its products. Spectra Logic produced another first when it released a tape library with integrated hardware-based

data encryption In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can decip ...

. Spectra introduced its TFinity tape library in November 2009, offering 99.9% reliability and scaling to 180

petabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s of storage capacity in an LTO-5 configuration. In December 2010 Spectra's tape-library product line won first place in all 14 categories of ''Storage'' magazine/SearchStorage.com's 2010 Quality Awards for enterprise and midrange tape libraries. Spectra Logic again earned top honors in the 2012 ''Storage'' magazine/SearchStorage.com's Quality Awards, winning both the enterprise and midrange tape library categories. In May 2012, DCIG, LLC released a "Tape Library Buyer's Guide", which evaluated over 60 tape libraries from 8 storage vendors. Only the Spectra Logic TFinity and T950 received the highest "Best-in-Class" ranking. Also that month, Spectra Logic announced that it would provide Spectra TFinity tape libraries to the

National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale computer infrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a ...

(NCSA) for their

Blue Waters Blue Waters was a petascale supercomputer operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On August 8, 2007, the National Science Board approved a resolution which authori ...

supercomputing system. The TFinity tape libraries will be able to store hundreds of petabytes of data and will be one of the world's largest active file repositories. Spectra Logic is a founding member of the Active Archive Alliance. Active archive is a method of tiered storage which gives users access to data across a virtualized file-system that migrates data between multiple storage systems.

Spectra T950

The Spectra T950 tape library stores media tapes in the tape library bundled in trays called TeraPacks. A TeraPack holds ten tapes, which increases the density of the tape storage, which the company claims simplifies the loading and unloading of the tapes from the library. There are Spectra T950 installations in several

high performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multid ...

(HPC) facilities, including the NASA

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

Argonne National Laboratory Argonne National Laboratory is a science and engineering research United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory operated by University of Chicago, UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facil ...

, and

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

. On 20 April 2009, NASA Ames announced that it would replace ten of their 20-year-old silo tape libraries with two Spectra Logic T950 tape libraries. This allowed the center to reclaim of floor space and increase its storage capacity from 12 petabytes to 32 petabytes. The new tape libraries used 20,000 tape cartridge slots and

Linear Tape-Open Linearity is the property of a mathematical relationship (''function Function or functionality may refer to: Computing * Function key, a type of key on computer keyboards * Function model, a structured representation of processes in a syste ...

(LTO-7) drives.

External links

Spectra Logic

References

{{Reflist Computer hardware companies Computer storage companies Computer companies of the United States

History

Spectra T950

See also

External links

References