Storage customers are often tied to the rise and fall of a vendor when it experiences takeover mania. Unfortunately, many customers of StorageTek experienced a certain level of discomfort when Sun bought STK in 2005. Sun customers are facing uncertainty again as Sun is being acquired by Oracle after a false start by IBM to get the merry-go-round going. Vendor stability in situations like this has a tendency to go in the ditch, putting customers’ storage infrastructure and their critical data at risk.

Fortunately for those Sun customers owning large tape libraries who are stuck on this dizzy ride, another vendor is more than capable of stepping in to fill the pending void as the STK line is acquired once again within about a 4 year span. Heck, one might wonder if this spate of buy / sell activity surrounding STK storage may become another Olympic demonstration sport in 2012?

Spectra Logic is recogized by others as being able to plug the gap and then some.  Backup and recovery expert W. Curtis Preston said (here) it’s good for the tape library market to have a new aggressive competitor.  "For a small company like Spectra to leapfrog IBM, Sun and Quantum in tape library capacity and density like this is awesome," he said.  "Spectra has always impressed me with its ability to go big [with products] and stay [a] small [company} at the same time." 

Being that one vendor capable of standing tall and calming the storage froth left by Sun in the large library space allows Spectra Logic to stand apart. With 30 years of deep, tape storage experience, an industry pedigree defined by innovation, a truck load of awards, and over 20,000 worldwide installations Spectra has brought to market the deepest archive and backup machine to grace a data center floor — ever. That machine is TFinity — the most awe-inspiring, jaw dropping tape library available.

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