St. Paul, Minn.-based Twin Cities Public Television (tpt) has upgraded to a Spectra Logic T950 tape library with BlueScale11 software. Tpt operates two digital stations with four program services. It produces its own television programs and also airs video from PBS. With a large, wide variety of content, tpt’s data set increases rapidly and must be retained anywhere from one week to perpetuity due to industry rights on some of its programs.
With the television station’s Spectra T120 tape library pushing its capacity thresholds the challenge of managing this rapid, sizeable data growth led to its search for a large, efficient storage system to accommodate its 180TB of data and to plan for future growth.
The Spectra T950 is being used for the nearline storage of all of tpt’s broadcast television programs. Data resides on the Spectra tape library and is transferred to the archive daily, then retrieved as historical programs are needed. tpt is also taking advantage of the newly available Global Spare tape drive option in Spectra’s BlueScale11 software, which enables a spare failover tape drive to be configured.
Tpt’s Spectra T950 can expand to eight total frames and 10,050 slots, allowing for 30.2PB (compressed) capacity. In addition to the Global Spare tape drive functionality, Spectra Logic’s BlueScale 11 software offers proactive drive and media health checks with its Library Lifecycle Management capabilities, high availability, detailed reporting features and proactive notification and tracking.
