Protecting vital data at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

SLAC develops and implements some of the world’s most advanced scientific tools for exploring how the universe works at the biggest, smallest and fastest scales. Operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, SLAC pushes the frontiers of knowledge and drives discoveries that benefit humankind. 

As the industry’s largest and most feature-rich tape library, the Spectra TFinity delivers unsurpassed reliability and storage density in the smallest footprint of any enterprise library on the market. In addition to LTO tape technology, the Spectra TFinity is also compatible with IBM’s TS11X0 enterprise tape technology and Oracle’s T10000x enterprise tape technology, enabling all three tape formats in the same library. 

With five joint research centres and facilities with Stanford, SLAC supports an array of scientific projects focused on cosmology and astrophysics, materials and energy science, catalysis, ultrafast science and cryogenic electron microscopy. This year, SLAC is finalising a major upgrade to its Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a powerful X-ray laser, that will significantly increase its power and capacity.  

In addition, SLAC supports the Rubin Observatory’s 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). With a mission to collect light from celestial objects and transform it into data for scientific discovery, the Rubin Observatory’s LSST will scan the entire visible Southern sky every few days for a decade, making it the widest, fastest and deepest view of the night sky ever observed.  

SLAC expects their total storage needs to reach upwards of two exabytes by 2033. 

“We are very excited about the deployment of the large Spectra Logic TFinity ExaScale Tape Library at SLAC,” said Betsy Doughty, Spectra Logic vice president of corporate marketing.  “Our world-class tape libraries have been deployed in many of the most prestigious scientific data centres across the globe and we could not be more honoured to help SLAC protect its invaluable scientific data that is resulting in extraordinary discovery-based breakthroughs.”