Tuning In to The Station

DALLAS — If you’re going to start a new storage blog, you might as well have it originate from one of the biggest data storage conferences in the world — Storage Networking World, being held this week at the massive Gaylord Texan resort here on the lovely shore of Lake Grapevine. So that’s what we’re doing. Welcome to eWEEK’s first all-storage, all-data-center-centric blog, eWEEK Storage Station.

I’m on the phone or personally meeting with storage industry folks all day long most days, so I hear a lot of things. So I’ll drop in newsworthy items, random thoughts from thought leaders, interesting marketing stats, snippets of overheard or personally originated conversations, rumors — all the stuff somebody like me can’t use in a regular news or feature-type story in eWEEK.

A blog can be an enormously freeing vehicle and fun to write, so I’m looking forward to this.

Item No. 1: Spectra Logic, of Boulder, Colo., tomorrow will announce that it is coming out with a new tape storage system that retains its inner components from start to upgrade — all the customer needs to do is buy a new frame and add more tape drives as necessary. The original tape drives, power supply, robotics, media and control modules all transfer to the new frame. Talk about conservation: Recycling is the key to this deal.

The T-Series tape library can grow from one to 24 tape drives, 50 to 680 slots of tape media, and up to 136TB of storage in a single-rack unit. The base price for a 50-slot tape library is $66,880. Check it out here.