Australian National Universit Deploys Two Spectra Logic Libraries and SGI

Spectra Logic
Corporation announced that the Australian National University (ANU) located
in Canberra, and ranked as one of the top universities in Australia,
deployed two Spectra Logic T950 enterprise tape libraries at the heart
of its 9.5 petabyte tape-based active archive to support ANU’s performance private
data cloud storage solution.

The cloud-based storage installation with Spectra’s tape-based active archive
allows ANU to support its data growth,
accelerate access to its research data, and improve data reliability.

ANU also hosts the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) –
Australia’s national high-end research computing service, funded by the
Australian Government through its NCRIS and Super Science research infrastructure
initiatives, and by a number of national research organizations including ANU,
CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia.

With the University’s
data doubling every 14-18 months, the enterprise requirements of ANU, together
with the research needs served by NCI, have led to an increasing requirement for storage and management.

"The Spectra Logic system
forms a central component of our storage cloud. We have more than 7PB
of initial critical research data that streams in and out of high performance
instruments, computational and data-intensive processes, as well as an
increasing need to share data for international data-centric collaborations,"
said Dr. Ben Evans, associate director of NCI.

ANU and NCI evaluated the best solution for their needs and, after evaluation, chose Spectra Logic’s archive solution within a SGI storage
cloud because of its reliability, scalability, and cost
efficiencies in terms of space, energy usage and total cost per terabyte. The
ANU cloud uses the SGI Data Migration Facility (DMF) tiered storage along with
the Spectra Logic tape libraries to scale NCI data archive volumes.

"The incorporation of the
Spectra Logic active archive solution provides a platform for storage growth,"
said Allan Williams, director of information technology services at the ANU.
"It allows us to keep our primary
data online and accessible to users, while also increasing the reliability of
our stored data across physical sites."

Active archive solutions turn offline archives into visible,
accessible extensions of online storage systems – enabling fast access to
archived data. Today’s innovative active archive applications provide the
ability to see and access data on tape through a file system interface, to view and search archived data files in large
heterogeneous online active tape and disk storage pools.

ANU’s active archive provides a dense, high capacity storage
solution for its cloud installation with significant economies of scale and
data integrity safeguards. In addition, Spectra Logic’s Media Lifecycle Management (MLM) feature helps to ensure
the University’s data is accessible when needed by providing complete media
health reporting.

Integrator SGI, a member of Spectra Logic’s SpectraEDGE partner program, architected, recommended and
implemented the data cloud storage solutions, including the new active archive
solution with the enterprise tape libraries.

"Spectra Logic’s archive
and backup solutions provide our customers with the latest innovations and
storage technologies to handle cloud, big data, back up and protection, data
preservation, compliance, and general data center storage needs," said
Nick Gorga, SGI general manager, Australia and New Zealand.

Spectra Logic’s storage solutions are for data intensive IT
environments including data cloud deployments, HPC, media and entertainment, large governmental and general IT
organizations.

Spurred by its growing number of customers and partners throughout
Australia and New Zealand, Spectra Logic recently announced its expanded investment in the region. This investment includes
increased sales, support and technical staff, an expanded presence in Sydney
and a strong channel recruitment program.

Spectra Logic offers a line of automated tape library solutions from
its entry-level T50e, mid-range T120, T200, T380 and T680, and enterprise scale
T950 and T-Finity libraries.