Spectra Expands Line of BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateways

Deep storage specialist Spectra announced that it has expanded its BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway family with the addition of the V Series and the P Series, which more than triples the throughput and number of tape drives managed compared with the standard BlackPearl S Series.

The V Series serves as the new entry-level option, with the ability to store 300 million objects and transfer data at up to 300MBps sustained to disk or tape.

With a small 2U form factor, the V Series combined with a Spectra T50e Tape Library could store up to 750TB in a 6U space.

Designed for larger environments, the P Series can store a billion or more objects, transfer up to 3,000MBps sustained to disk or tape, and manage 20 or more LTO-7 tape drives.

“Some industries are experiencing single-digit growth rates, while others have data growth rates of more than 100 percent,” Matt Starr, CTO of Spectra Logic, told eWEEK. “When your data is doubling every year, a whole new set of problems emerge that must be dealt with. No longer does the next-capacity disk drive keep you from running out of space or power. Customers with exponential data growth need a strategy to protect and store their data in the most cost-, space- and power-efficient manner that business rules define.”

Most companies today hoard data, storing it on spinning disks without tiering it off to cheaper storage, but when data growth is extreme, tiering or deleting is really the only choice, according to Starr.

“Though it is now possible to keep everything forever, not all customers need to, so knowing the time data can be moved down a tier or deleted is important,” he said. “The second challenge is metadata. Most companies today are not collecting and processing metadata around their data sets. As these sets grow, the lack of metadata will be their Achilles heel.”

The Spectra BlackPearl line is targeted at archives rather than backup—archives can provide backup function: one copy of the data on online disk, while another copy in the archive serves as backup.

“We are going to be seeing more and more applications becoming cloud storage aware. Today’s file systems have lived past their usefulness when we talk about massive data sets,” Starr said. “This is where ReSTful interfaces like S3 really begin to show their value.”

Cloud protocols are used in private, hybrid and public cloud storage systems, and S3 is becoming the de facto standard to talk to these storage systems. In almost all cases, the back-end storage consists of an object storage architecture.

“As more applications become cloud aware or even the OS itself—Google Drive is a good example—the easier archiving and data protection will become,” Starr said.