Quantum Announces i7 Raptor Tape Library For Hyperscalers
Blocks&Files, Thursday, March 21st, 2024
Scalar tape library supplying Quantum has made an early announcement that an i7 Raptor library is coming, designed for hyperscale customers' AI workloads.
Its present Scalar line has three products: 25-400 tape slot i3 with 1-24 half-height drives, 50-800 slot i6 with 1-24 full-height drives, and high-end i6000 with 100-14,100 slots and 1-192 full-height drives. There is also a scale-out i6H product, dating from 2022, which is for web-scale companies - hyperscalers in other words - and based on a Redundant Array of Independent Libraries (RAIL) design providing RAID-like protection and performance. The drive numbers and tape slot counts for the i6H have not been revealed, but we think its constituent 48RU-high racks each have 24 drives and 800 tape slots with in-rack robotics. There are many similarities between the i6H and i7.