Digital tape system provider Spectra Logic announced the debut of the RESTful interface for robotic tape storage systems, Deep Simple Storage Service (DS3), which enables user-friendly storage of large amounts of data.
The DS3 interface is designed to allow applications to move large quantities of data with less effort, and is aimed at organizations interested in accessing the lowest cost storage media for large data objects. It reduces cost and simplifies management by providing intelligent data object reads/writes, which the company said optimizes tape drive and tape media utilization and performance.
The interface is the cornerstone of Spectra’s vision for delivering deep storage solutions for customers grappling with cost-effective ways to store massive volumes of long-term data. By leveraging RESTful protocols, the DS3 interface enables modern architecture frameworks to communicate with massively scalable deep storage technologies.
“The whole concept of ‘deep storage’ is on target with the trends and requirements ESG is seeing in the market,” Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst of Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “More organizations are recognizing the long term value that lies within their data, so data volumes and retention periods are increasing. Pair this trend with the market’s desire to use Restful interfaces and Spectra Logic seems to be exactly in the right place to take advantage. It’s a good idea all around.”
Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style that ignores the details of component implementation and protocol syntax and instead focues on the roles of components, the constraints upon their interaction with other components, and their interpretation of data elements.
“Our vision and roadmap for delivering deep storage solutions is designed to meet the new, evolving storage requirements of modern data centers and use cases,” said Nathan Thompson, founder and CEO of Spectra Logic. “There is a transformation occurring in how organizations amass, use and store long term data that necessitates a new tier of storage–deep storage–that delivers extreme low cost, power efficiency, high density and massive scalability. This tier must be designed to manage large, bulk quantities of data for extended and possibly indefinite periods of time while meeting the needs of newer data center architectures that leverage storage in the form of data objects and utilize Restful interfaces.”
In addition, the DS3 supports deep storage in a wide capacity range with configurations as small as 15 terabytes and scales into multiple exabytes in a single tape storage system.
“The new interface announced today is the first in a series of innovative technologies and solutions we will be introducing to support deep storage,” Thompson added. “Adopting DS3 has been made easy for our current customers, as well as new customers. It’s supported by all of our T-Series tape libraries as a standalone, deep storage solution or a current customer’s library can be partitioned to add on a deep storage partition.”