By Betsy Doughty
VP, Corporate Marketing, Spectra Logic

Spectra Logic, along with a handful of other storage industry leaders, started the Active Archive Alliance over a decade ago. When my predecessor and good friend, Molly Presley, conceived this idea, the term ‘Active Archive’ was relatively unknown and technologies were just coming together to provide the means to execute this storage strategy. The combination of tape, disk, software, and now cloud, gives organizations the ability to build a storage environment that balances the cost of storage with the speed of access to ALL data that perfectly fits their needs. That is the beauty of an Active Archive. Read More

By Rich Gadomski,
Head of Tape Evangelism, FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc.

In mid-December, Fujifilm issued a press release to announce that, together with IBM Research, they had successfully achieved a record areal density of 317 Gbpsi (billion bits per square inch) on next-generation magnetic tape coated with next- generation Strontium Ferrite (SrFe) magnetic particles. This areal density achievement would yield an amazing native storage capacity of 580TB on a standard-sized data cartridge. That’s almost 50 times more capacity than what we have now with an LTO-8 tape based on Barium Ferrite (BaFe) at 12TB native. Read More

What better way to kick off 2021 than to announce the news that we’ve added more features to Spectra StorCycle , our award-winning storage lifecycle management solution.  The new functionality makes it easier than ever for customers to migrate their data off of expensive primary storage and manage it effortlessly throughout its lifecycle so that it remains available and protected to provide long-term value to organizations.

While we added many new features to StorCycle 3.3, one of the most exciting is an open RESTful API that enables users to build custom integrations to StorCycle. These commands might be used for actions such as bulk creation of storage locations, scripting of migrations that first require actions of other systems, and allowing user restores through a separate web portal. Read More

Spectra Logic has long established itself as a trusted advisor to its customers and partners in the data storage space. As thought leaders in their fields, Spectra executives often share their industry insights with technology publications. Catch some of the most recent articles on this blog!

Tony Mendoza shares how Spectra overcame a ransomware attack

If you’re in the storage business, the last thing you want to do is ‘announce’ a ransomware attack. But that’s actually counter-intuitive. We were hit with ransomware, and as a storage business, we feel it is important to share the story in order to help others prepare. In the end, we overcame the attack with virtually no data loss and absolutely no data stolen. But there’s no lock that can’t be broken into. To minimize the damage and assure business continuance, organizations must assess their infrastructure, their access to experts and their approach to IT security. Read More

The Tape Storage Council (TSC), a collaborative industry group of which Spectra is a founding member, released their annual memo “Tape Has Become a Strategic Imperative in the Mass Storage Landscape” this week. The 2020 report hones in on how the COVID-19 pandemic and economic uncertainty is impacting the storage industry. It also takes a look at how ransomware attacks are impacting storage strategies. These industry wide challenges are bringing tape to the center stage of conversations.

From the report: “The role tape serves in today’s modern data centers is expanding fast and tape momentum will increase as data growth continues on an explosive trajectory across many new applications, workloads, and in most of the hyperscale and hyperscale-lite data centers. With these advancements in place, modern tape technology delivers the most reliable, energy efficient and cost-effective data center storage solution available today.” Read More

On October 20, Spectra hosted SpectraLIVE Customer Edition, the first-ever fully customer-focused virtual event for Spectra. SpectraLIVE Customer Edition provided attendees with a glimpse into the real-life implementations of eight Spectra end users from varying market segments (think general IT to media and entertainment to national laboratories). Presenters shared their specific challenges and how their partnership with Spectra helped them ultimately achieve their IT goals. The event wrapped with an Exascale Panel discussion that included two national laboratory end users along with two subject matter experts from Spectra. Here’s a quick recap of each session: Read More

Spectra is going to break an unspoken rule: “What happens in your data center, stays in your data center.” Organizations are notoriously secretive about what happens in their data centers. This is understandable. Data drives the operations of most organizations, and is sometimes considered the secret sauce of operations, possibly a competitive advantage. Likewise, discussing the exact means of data protection would possibly give the bad guys insight into vulnerabilities to be exploited. And if nothing else, it’s sometimes hard to shine a light on something that cost your organization time and money. Read More

Let’s talk about data storage management solutions and how Spectra Logic’s StorCycle storage lifecycle management software is helping customers address these challenges. Many organizations today have large amounts of data that is growing rapidly and that is critical to their business. All this data is being kept typically on one active primary storage tier, when in fact up to 80% of that data is inactive and doesn’t need to be stored on that expensive active tier taking up valuable space and costing money. Secondary storage solutions such as cloud, spinning disk and tape are all available as lower cost options, but inactive data is usually still not being moved because it is difficult to identify, difficult to migrate, and difficult to access once it’s migrated. Read More

Spectra Logic is delighted to share the time-lapse video of the installation of the Spectra® TFinity® ExaScale Tape Library in the CERN Data Centre. Magnetic tapes are used as the main long-term data storage medium at CERN. The tapes are stored in tape libraries, where they are retrieved by robotic arms. Their TFinity library is leveraging the open format LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape technology, has 15,000 physical cartridge slots and can accommodate 48 tape drives in total.

Time-lapse video of the installation of the Spectra Logic TFinity tape library in the CERN Data Centre. Read More

This year a lot has changed in how most of us do business. For end users in numerous vertical markets, making decisions related to managing, accessing and preserving vital data has become more important than ever.  Peer stories can resonate deeply, offering colleagues the reasoning behind a technology strategy or the real-world benefits of an implementation. With most trade shows canceled and countries and organizations restricting employee travel, Spectra Logic is providing multiple virtual opportunities to connect, engage and educate its community. Read More