Spectra Logic BlackPearl Gateway Crosses Data-Intensive Applications

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Spectra Logic’s BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway line of products now encompasses two new products - the entry-level BlackPearl V Series developed to lowes the cost of moving to a hybrid cloud system, and the BlackPearl P Series, built to manage up to three times greater throughput and number of tape drives compared to the standard BlackPearl S Series. Through these two developments, BlackPearl products are now aimed to accommodate smaller enterprises such as post-production houses, up to large organisations requiring high performance to handle complex, growing data sets, such as multi-site networks.

The BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway was introduced in 2013 to service and support data-intensive environments experiencing high growth at that time. Since then BlackPearl has been a cost-effective means of moving massive amounts of data to tape, and more recently, to disk and public cloud. It forms a direct interface from a specific, local workflow into an active archive, giving access to nearline storage, tape and cloud, and a potential to reduce costs. 

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The entry-level BlackPearl V Series can store 300 million objects and transfer data at up to 300 MBps sustained to disk or tape. With a small 2U form factor, the V Series combined with a Spectra T50e Tape Library, for example, could store up to 750TB in a 6U space. This figure is derived from calculations using 6TB raw for LTO-7 and 2.5:1 compression. 

For larger environments, the BlackPearl P Series manages large archives that have higher throughput requirements. Designed with more performance, the P Series can store a billion or more objects, transfer up to 3000 MBps sustained to disk or tape, and manage 20 or more LTO-7 tape, opening the option to move on to future generations of LTO and TS tape drives.

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The expansion of the BlackPearl family follows other recently announced updates to Spectra’s BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway, including an integration with the Cyberduck open source client software tool, and direct disaster recovery allowing direct archive to Amazon’s public cloud. Spectra BlackPearl can integrate directly with Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Standard, and can automatically restore data archived to Glacier and Infrequent Access, Standard – IA.

The integration of Cyberduck as a BlackPearl client means users can use direct drag-and-drop data moves between BlackPearl objects that reside on local Spectra ArcticBlue disk file systems or tape libraries, and various online cloud object stores. Using Spectra’s private cloud ecosystem, infrequently accessed data can be archived to lower cost disk or tape, reducing storage and recall fees associated with a pure public cloud. www.SpectraLogic.com