The rising cost of storage in media and entertainment is not merely attributable to increased procurement costs to meet content growth. While the battle for viewership has led organizations to balance a growing need for original content ownership with flat storage budgets, the storage solution costs themselves have in fact decreased over the last number of years. The rising cost of storing content is almost always traceable to the hidden costs associated with the improper retention and management of large amounts of digital content. These hidden costs include exploding numbers of multi-terabyte file servers, increasing backup storage capacities (often a multiple of actual production data), daunting inventory tasks, growing storage management complexities, missing skills and challenging data availability requirements. The lack of a cost-efficient storage management tool that brings visibility and analytics to data for proper and intelligent tiering of data relative to its perceived value and access patterns has forced organizations to postpone decisions and actions that properly address data lifecycle management. Read More

Spectra is delighted to share that one of our customers, IN2P3’s Computing Centre (CC-IN2P3), showcased its new Spectra® TFinity® ExaScale Tape Library to the world. The Spectra TFinity complements IN2P3’s current robotics and provides 60PB of data storage on magnetic tapes, allowing them to store even more scientific data.

About CC-IN2P3

IN2P3’s Computing Centre is a CNRS support and research unit linked to IN2P3, the institute that pursues and coordinates research on particle physics, nuclear physics and astroparticle physics. As a national research infrastructure, the CC-IN2P3 designs and operates an array of services, especially a mass storage system and mass data resources. Read More

Unmanaged assets are typically external to traditional asset management applications, but exist in a variety of media and entertainment environments. In broadcast, examples include raw or original content, graphics and still images. In post-production, it can encompass any asset from raw content to finished projects, and anything in between. The amount of storage generated by these unmanaged assets often grows at an astonishing rate, which can lead to exorbitant storage costs when assets reside mainly on primary and production storage. Read More

Spectra Logic is a leader in delivering innovative and economical data storage and data management solutions for the modern data center. The company’s technology portfolio meets the needs of customers in government, scientific research, high performance computing, media and entertainment and cloud environments. Among its offerings is the Spectra® TFinity® ExaScale Tape Library, the largest single data storage machine in the world. The TFinity will store and allow access to more than two exabytes (2,000 petabytes) of data when fully populated with IBM® TS1160 tape drives and media. With unsurpassed storage density packaged in the smallest footprint of any enterprise library in the market, the TFinity has become a staple at many of the world’s most recognized supercomputing and data-driven research institutions – one of which is the world-famous Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Read More

Long known for its tape storage solutions, Spectra continues to push the envelope when it comes to diversified storage options, including options for disk-only environments.

Media companies that create and own vast amounts of content continue to face challenges associated with balancing cost against the increasingly growing storage capacities that are required of modern infrastructures. In order to support future business development, they require innovative and agile solutions to help them shift their resources to their core businesses in this dynamic and competitive landscape, looking to disk-only solutions to satiate such needs. These solutions need to be fast, versatile, cost-effective and open, to enable them to maintain control over their content and give them an edge over their competition. Read More

As we close out calendar year 2019 and our 40^th year in business, Spectra Logic has much to celebrate. Here is a recap of some of our top achievements:

1) Product Announcements: In September 2019, Spectra debuted StorCycle, our new storage lifecycle management software solution that streamlines the way organizations identify, manage, protect and access their growing amounts of data. General availability was announced the first week of December. StorCycle’s extensive roadmap will continue to help Spectra develop new markets and drive both software and hardware sales. Read More

This year’s holiday celebrations at Spectra Logic were certainly jolly. To kick start the festivities, Spectra’s Summit, a women-led organization at Spectra Logic that builds community, organized a holiday happy hour and white elephant gift exchange on the second week of December.

Spectra’s Summit group celebrates the season by hosting a white elephant gift exchange

Spectra team members worldwide continued to get in the spirit with their ugly holiday sweater competitions. The company’s U.K. and U.S. teams had a great time making ugly look good with fun outfits. Read More

The Tape Storage Council (TSC), a collaborative industry group of which Spectra is a founding member, released their annual memo, “Tape Takes Aim on Unprecedented Data Growth” this November. The report highlights current trends, usages and technology innovations occurring within the tape storage industry and what these developments mean for the overall data storage market.

Tape Has the Greatest Potential to Address Soaring Capacity Demand

The chief idea in TSC’s newly released memo is that tape’s sustained expansion in its offerings and reach uniquely position tape technology to address key storage-intensive challenges, including cloud storage, High Performance Computing (HPC), the expanding number of hyperscale data centers, storage requirement growth in entertainment, surveillance, and the rapid emergence of the IoT and edge computing. Having been fueled by more than a decade of significant technological development, tape’s steady technology improvements continue to give tape the lowest cost, highest capacity, fastest data transfer rates, and most reliable storage medium available, with the reliability of tape three orders of magnitude better than the best HDDs. Read More

Spectra executives meet customers and partners in the booth.

Spectra Logic last week exhibited at one of its largest industry trade shows of the year: Supercomputing 2019 (SC19). An international event dedicated to showcasing work in high performance computing (HPC), networking, data storage and analysis, this year’s event was held at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado.

The week was memorable for Spectra for a number of reasons. On Tuesday afternoon, Senior Director of Hardware Engineering Matt Ninesling gave a presentation at the DDN Storage booth theater, sharing shifts in the tape drive market and trends in data center infrastructure and data migration. Tuesday evening was marked by Spectra’s participation in a Supercomputing Birds of a Feather session titled “Looking Ahead to Tape Technology’s Role in HPC – Future Advancements, Challenges, and Roadmap”. For the Birds of a Feather session, Spectra CTO Matt Starr was joined on stage by Versity’s Bruce Gilpin, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Dave Bonnie and IBM’s Ed Childers and Jim Gerry. They discussed data growth trends in large scale environments, tape technology, performance and accessibility, and cloud storage. Read More