Spectra Logic today announced the BlackPearl Deep Storage Appliance
that enables a new tier of storage to manage massive amounts of data indefinitely at an extremely low cost. BlackPearl is the first product to support the new DS3 interface , which makes it easy for new data center architectures to store large data objects on tape via a simple RESTful interface.
The BlackPearl Deep Storage Appliance provides intelligent data management and delivers low
cost, ease of use and scalability. It enables data-intensive, long term storage users, including those in Web 2.0, cloud services, big data, media and entertainment, oil and gas exploration, life sciences, federal and state government, social media and finance, among others. The technology provides low cost, high density, scalable tape library-based deep storage into fast-growth data environments.
The BlackPearl appliance offers a RESTful, object-based interface to deep storage by leveraging the new SpectaLogic DS3 interface and acts as an intelligent intermediary between online and deep storage environments. It was designed for very large data sets that scale from hundreds of terabytes up to petabyte or exabyte in scale, and delivers the lowest cost way to scale and store long term data.
With BlackPearl integrated with Spectra’s tape libraries, solution costs range from $0.09 - $0.14 per gigabyte (GB) in typical configurations, and even lower for very large systems (10 petabytes or more). Shown below is a Spectra Logic 40-frame T-Finity storage system.
Many public cloud offerings charge on the basis of ‘per gigabyte per month’ into perpetuity, and disk array storage costs can cost approximately $1.00 per GB(1) and NAS disk solutions may cost $0.45 per GB.
BlackPearl includes a DS3 server to which DS3 clients can connect and enable tape libraries to be used as object storage platforms accessable by web applications. Data is stored in open, self-describing Linear Tape File System (LTFS), tapes can be read by any LTFS-capable system.
The BlackPearl Deep Storage Appliance is available now within a beta program and will be generally available in December 2013. Current Spectra T-Series customers can leverage their existing tape library with BlackPearl by adding in a deep storage partition in the tape library that is currently in use for archive, backup or disaster recovery. More information about Spectra’s BlackPearl appliance is available here.
