A leading utility heightened its security and regulatory compliance with a locally tiered, multi-copy tape architecture built for durability and operational continuity.
The Challenge
A major utility serving 10 million customers needed to modernize its backup and disaster recovery strategy. The solution had to meet regulatory requirements, strengthen cyber resilience, and ensure uninterrupted operations.
The organization sought a storage system capable of supporting two geographically separate sites, writing multiple copies to tape, and protecting over 150 TB — all while maintaining a low total cost of ownership.
The Solution
Spectra and Cohesity designed a redundant, dual-site, on-premises solution that archives data to Amazon S3-compatible object-based tape. Each location is equipped with a Spectra Stack tape library configured with LTO-9 Fibre Channel drives and the BlackPearl® Object Gateway, which provides policy-driven object storage with integrated tiering to tape.
Cohesity Data Cloud orchestrates automated, secure data movement across the storage environment. At each site, its local Cloud Archive Vault writes two copies to Spectra object-based tape, resulting in four copies in total. The utility ships one copy from each location to secure off-site storage with Iron Mountain.
The Result
The utility now benefits from layered, air-gapped data protection that defends against threat vectors, site-level disruptions, and accidental data loss.
This approach enables reliable business continuity restoration while supporting long-term recoverability and lifecycle governance, strengthening its compliance posture.
The Environment Snapshot
Each location includes:
Cohesity
- Data Cloud Production & Disaster Recovery Clusters
Spectra Logic
- BlackPearl Object Gateway
- Spectra Stack tape library (720 TB capacity; 40 slots)
- LTO-9 Fibre Channel tape drives
