Spectra T950.

A single T950 frame carries 36.8 PB native with up to twenty-four drives. A fully expanded eight-frame configuration carries 10,020 LTO slots, 400.8 PB native, and up to 120 drives at 172.8 TB/hr. Because the library grows by frame rather than by replacement, an institution can specify against the data it has and add frames against the data it acquires — which is the property that makes a ten-year archive commitment defensible at the point of purchase.

Robotics are a single roving TeraPack system, and up to sixteen SLS partitions are supported. Partitioning is what makes concurrent multi-workload operation tractable in practice: each workload sees its own library, with its own media pool and its own retention policy, while the institution buys and powers one system. The alternative — a separate library per workload — multiplies floor space, maintenance contracts, and operational surface for no gain.

Media integrity is managed continuously rather than discovered at restore time, which is the distinction that matters for archives with multi-decade horizons. The Spectra Vision camera system verifies inventory and barcodes, certified media is tracked through its lifecycle, cleaning is automated, and ejects are queued. Encryption is available through BlueScale Standard, BlueScale Professional, and KMIP.

Figures are Spectra Logic published specifications for the maximum configuration of this library family using current tape generations.

The same library serves as the archive target for LStore, as the target for Constancy™ — the Unique Checksum enterprise network backup system — and as the tape tier for the CMS Tier 2 research-data holding ACCRE maintains for the Compact Muon Solenoid collaboration at CERN. Three concurrent production roles on one library is not an unusual configuration in research computing; it is what an efficient tape deployment looks like where an institution’s storage and backup architectures have been planned together rather than procured separately. The T950 is also the library Unique Checksum certifies as part of the bundled LStore deployment — the disk depots, the placement engine, the tape integration layer, and the library itself, supported as one system. The Operations & Lifecycle page describes how data is directed onto the tape tier in production.

The full library family is set out on the Spectra Logic page; the next tier is Spectra TFinity Series.

For a Spectra T950 conversation — configuration, capacity planning, media generation, or integration with an existing storage platform — write to sales@uniquechecksum.com.