U.S. Army Research Laboratory Orders StorageTek SL8500

StorageTek, the leading provider of enterprise information lifecycle management, today announces the receipt of an order for the first of the new generation of StorageTek enterprise-scale tape libraries, the StreamLine 8500, on behalf of the U. S. Army Research Laboratory. The order represents the first SL8500 deployment into the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). The StorageTek SL8500 will play disaster recovery and mission continuity roles in support of the HPCMP. The ARL-MSRC hosts one of the largest supercomputing facilities in the world, providing DoD researchers a highly productive environment for simulation studies used to develop and improve war-fighting technologies. Today, the ARL-MSRC archives an ever-growing collection of over a hundred terabytes of research and simulation study data using multiple StorageTek 9310 Powderhorn enterprise tape libraries and 9840/9940 tape drives. The new StorageTek SL8500 will serve as a backup archive, providing equivalent data capacity and tape drive capability in a much smaller footprint and with significantly increased reliability. "The deployment of the SL8500 into the U.S. Army Research Laboratory will provide unprecedented data storage scalability, density, and robustness in support of the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program," said Thomas Kendall, the chief engineer of the ARL Major Shared Resource Center. StorageTek enterprise-scale tape technologies are in use at each of the four DoD MSRC's throughout the nation. With tape products engineered for punishing 24x7 duty cycles and maintained by StorageTek's worldwide support, StorageTek is providing the tape technologies of choice for the most demanding customers in the world.