Sun StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System

Value

Don't stop for growth: upgrade without downtime

This library system's RealTime Growth capability lets you dynamically update the drives, slots, and microcode while the library is operating, eliminating growth disruptions, keeping data available to users. The system itself grows modularly to 32x its single-unit size just as fast as you need more capacity. And, you don't have to shut down production to expand capacity. You can smoothly scale from 1,448 usable slots and 64 tape drives to more than 70,000 slots ¹ and 448 drives in incremental, modular additions. The economy of scalability has never been greater.

An immediate replacement for the previous generation

The SL8500 modular library system represents some dramatic design improvements over its predecessor, the Sun StorageTek PowderHorn 9310 tape library. It includes many more redundant, field-replaceable components for improved availability. It also features a new set of advanced RaceTrack architecture robotics, which run on a faster oval path layout. This unique design accelerates tape loading to 1000 exchanges per hour, the industry's fastest rate, roughly double that of the 9310.

More savings from day one: floor space

This system's smaller rectangular form factor, a product of the new internal design, saves considerably more floor space in your data center. With a tape density of 50 slots per square foot, depending on drive type, it is almost double the density of the PowderHorn 9310, and your potential footprint savings can be huge. If you are a 9310 customer, the sooner you make the switch, trading up to the SL8500 modular library system, the more you'll save on space, operations, and maintenance over time. The savings can be as much as 50 percent on maintenance and operational expenses.

Access and Simplicity

Designed for multiplatform consolidations

The SL8500 modular library system simplifies offline tape storage management and solves your interoperability issues. It gives you seamless heterogeneous channel attachment and support for mixed drives/media. That lets you share your mega-library across supercomputers, mainframes, servers, applications, and their preferred media types without requiring partition management.

Mix it up: you choose

The StorageTek Any Cartridge Any Slot technology lets you consolidate multiple heterogeneous libraries and seamlessly mix tape drive technologies. The SL8500 supports the T10000, T9840, and T9940 lines of tape drives, and midrange LTO, SDLT, and DLT-S4 drives, as well as VolSafe secure media technology to meet your compliance requirements.

You set the speed

The SL8500 modular tape library system can be configured to optimize your slower archive needs or your high-performance backup and restore needs. You can even choose the performance level of the robotics. There's no reason to pay for a fixed price/performance point anymore. Your requirements are more complex and warrant more simple flexibility. Now you have it.

No single point of failure

Hot-swappable and fully redundant components, including multiple robots, help keep the library running 24/7/365. It truly delivers state-of-the-art enterprise reliability, availability, and serviceability.

Trust

Need to encrypt? No Problem

The Sun StorageTek T10000B, T9840D and LTO 4 tapes drives give you crypto-ready device-based encryption. When you can do more work with fewer, faster drives, you're saving money and time. But built-in encryption is a big bonus. Plus, while you're adhering to regulations, these drives give you Sun StorageTek VolSafe secure media technology, the industry's most innovative non-erasable, non-rewritable, tape-based write once, read many (WORM) enterprise storage solution.