Earlier this week Spectra Logic announced the Spectra Cube, a modern tape storage library focused on ease of use and maintenance while delivering up to 75PB of data capacity. The Cube is meant to have little or no downtime and allows the installation of new tape cartridge drives without powering off. The Spectra Cube supports Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier API access, and is stated to be ideal for “storage services by managed service providers and cloud service providers”, more generally speaking.
In terms of maximum tape storage capacity, the Spectra Cube leverages Spectra’s own TeraPack tape cartridges with support for LTO-6 through LTO-9 and a maximum storage capacity of up to 30 Petabytes uncompressed. With compression, that’s up to 75 Petabytes. The library also supports up to 16 partitions, intended for use in shared or “multi-tenant” environments.
Spectra Logic is set to demonstrate the Cube at the 2024 NAB Show, which begins today at the Las Vegas Convention Center. There will be an additional demonstration at the ISC High Performance 2024, which spans May 13-15 at the Congress Center in Hamburg, Germany.
“Compared to typical public cloud options,” claims Matt Ninesling, Spectra’s Senior Director of Tape Portfolio Management, “Spectra Cube solutions can cut the costs of cold storage by half or more, while providing better data control and protection from existential threats like ransomware.”
This statement is provided alongside information regarding Spectra’s lifetime guarantee on its Spectra Certified media (like the aforementioned Spectra TeraPack cartridges). Spectra claims more than 40 metrics are monitored and recorded for each tape in a library to enable data error assessment, to apply prevention measures, and fixes. Integrity verification checks should also protect data from being corrupted or lost, in theory.
Overall, the Spectra Cube seems like a quite modern choice for the old classic tape storage medium— but not without merit, if its pricing and capacity are actually to scale with the needs of you or your business. The official Spectra Cube product page seems to require you to contact them for an exact quote, which we don’t advise non-enterprise consumers to do.
