The live virtual event kicked off with VP of Corporate Marketing Betsy Doughty introducing the company and its history, as well as offering a peek at Spectra Logic’s bold transformation and the strategic direction Spectra is headed to serve customers who manage data across multiple clouds and sites, all while fending off cyberattacks that continue to threaten brands and bottom lines. Spectra experts dove into the company’s ransomware use case, reviewed Spectra’s newest solution, Vail, and enhanced portfolio of solutions. These sessions were followed by an end user presentation from Spectra customer USGS who shared details of their organization’s deployment of Vail software. Here is a quick recap of each conference segment:
Spectra’s ransomware experience
Spectra Logic Director of IT Tony Mendoza discussed Spectra’s ransomware experience with the NetWalker virus in 2020. In the end, Spectra Logic refused to pay the $3.6 million in cryptocurrency demanded by the attackers. Tony shared what Spectra learned in the process about how to protect against a malicious attack and how to combine threat protection software and attack-hardened storage to achieve true data resiliency in a storage infrastructure.
New solution review: Spectra Vail Distributed Multi-Cloud Data Management Software
Spectra’s Vice President of Product Management and Solutions Engineering David Feller presented on the company’s newest solution, Spectra Vail. Vail is a is a breakthrough data management software that centralizes data management across on-premises and multi-cloud architectures, enabling dynamic on-demand data access, placement and storage with a single global namespace. Feller detailed Vail workflows and how the software solution can reduce overall costs for organizations that want to leverage the power of the cloud without the hefty egress fees.
With Vail, all files appear in their native format and are readily accessible and securely protected no matter where data is created or stored, whether in a public cloud, on-premises, a hybrid set-up or multi-cloud. The software provides seamless, universal availability of data across multiple physical sites and multiple clouds. Learn more about Spectra Vail here.
Spectra solution updates: BlackPearl, StorCycle and Tape Solutions
David Feller also explained the term ‘attack-hardened storage’, and how Spectra’s entire portfolio of solutions has been enhanced to better protect data. This includes updates to BlackPearl platform, Spectra’s StorCycle Storage Lifecycle Management Software and the Spectra® Stack Tape Library.
BlackPearl now includes attack-hardened features such as triggered snapshots, multi-factor authentication, encryption, replication and virtual air gap for ransomware mitigation. The latest StorCycle release (3.6) integrates with BlackPearl to provide ransomware snapshots at the end of migrate jobs and allows users to configure an existing BlackPearl object storage system as a storage location, enabling easy access to object or tape archive. Finally, new attack-hardened features for the Spectra Stack include a cold partition that locks tapes so that they cannot be overwritten or loaded into a drive in the event of a ransomware attack.
End user implementation: Spectra Vail in USGS
USGS Computer Scientist Jeff Falgout described USGS’s mission; the significance of the data sets that USGS generates, stores and delivers to the scientific community; and how Spectra Vail unifies data from research locations and data centers across the country. USGS’s Vail implementation helps them ensure that data arrives from collection sites and instruments to USGS storage repositories through a timely, reliable and usable workflow while facilitating data access for research staff at both local computing workstations and remote high end computing resources. Read the white paper for more information.
Did you miss the virtual conference on October 27? You can stream the recorded session on-demand at your convenience. SpectraLIVE recordings are available for viewing here.
Other SpectraLIVE offerings include virtual meetings with Spectra executives and product specialists, monthly webinars, subscribing to the Spectra blog and viewing our library of on-demand content. To learn more about the full SpectraLIVE virtual program, click here.
