Techtel and Spectra Logic expand FOX SPORTS’ archive system at new facility

Sydney, Australia – FOX SPORTS has added to its existing Spectra Logic archive by purchasing a second T950 tape archive system which has been installed at their Artarmon facility. The country’s leading sports broadcaster had been using their initial T950 Spectra Logic tape archive for 5 years prior to the new addition. The latest 6-frame T950 tape library was supplied and installed by local distributor Techtel as a part of FOX SPORTS’ expansion plans, ensuring total security of their archive content as their operations continue to expand.

The Spectra T950 library is designed and built to meet the stringent content storage requirements of the media and entertainment industry for data integrity, data security and high reliability. It reduces staff involvement significantly, affordably scales in throughput and capacity, and supports multiple generations of current and future tape formats. The T950 library deployed at FOX SPORTS was originally deployed as LTO-5 but with the option to replace drives and upgrade to LTO-6. This upgrade was successfully undertaken late in 2013 and the sportscaster now enjoys the added benefits of LTO-6 including the first Spectra Certified Barrium Ferrite (BaFE) LTO-6 media, capable of storing more than 2.5TB native per tape and supporting data transfer speeds of up to 160MB/ps.

“The archival data of any broadcaster is invaluable so it is important to be heading into the future with a solution that is secure, reliable, and can expand above and beyond storage requirements for years to come,” commented Mal Chandler, Head of Sales at Techtel. “In relation to the Spectra and LTO-based data assets, Techtel provided assistance throughout the relocation project of FOX SPORTS who are now well into their second year of operation in the new facility.”

Spectra Logic will be exhibiting at NAB 2014 on booth SL11816, 7-10 April. See their latest storage solution; the Spectra BlackPearl™ Deep Storage Appliance. BlackPearl delivers the most scalable and cost-effective long-term storage on the market, and meets the present and future demands of extreme data growth and long-term retention. BlackPearl enables users to deploy a tier of deep storage that is not only the lowest cost storage available but also easy to manage and scalable to Exabytes of data and beyond.