I think one of my favorite sayings I heard on more than one occasion and in various different words at SC10 this year was, “It is good to be Spectra!”  I heard this from customers, partners, VARs, analysts and other employees, and it is certainly true.  The tape war is on and by all accounts, Spectra is winning the war one battle at a time.  I heard so many times from so many people that we seem to be the dominant tape company in the market.  Tape is who we are.  It is what we do.  After 31 years of being in business, these truths are starting to manifest themselves in our continued success as a tape company.  The past few years, we have been experiencing much of our success and growth in the High Performance Computing industry not because of tape, but what we can do with tape.  Spectra has committed to continued research and development by investing millions into new features and functionality that are a direct result of our HPC customer requirements. We are therefore able to offer direct benefit and value to them. Read More

Gartner last month announced the results of an enterprise infrastructure survey conducted with over 1,000 large enterprises -http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1460213 – and they make interesting reading. According to respondents; data growth is the biggest data centre hardware infrastructure challenge for large enterprises. Now, this in itself is probably not surprising – vendors, end-users and other industry analysts have been talking about this challenge for some time. The inescapable truth is that storage demands are growing, and the answer lies somewhere between provisioning greater capacity and making more efficient use of the resources available. What is particularly striking is that 62% of respondents reported that they will be investing in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011. Read More

You’ve heard the saying "the more things change the more they stay the same." Per Wikipedia this is a "proverb that makes the observation that turbulent changes do not affect reality on a deeper level other than to cement the status quo." I think this describes the backup situation in the Small to Mid-sized Enterprise (SME) environment perfectly.  Read More

Last week, Spectra was one of hundreds of vendors at IP Expo in London. Several of Spectra’s business partners were in attendance as well, and it is always interesting to see what they are up to.  Read More

 I’ve worked for most of my professional life in data storage, focused primarily on data protection.  I am always looking for ways to better protect data.  I typically think about how to make things run more quickly and reliably, and with less user intervention.  Occasionally, I look at identifying and preparing for potentially unexpected outage causes.  I’ve experienced recoveries or complete infrastructure failures caused by various random acts: a spilled glass of milk, using a floor buffer and plugging a network cable into the incorrect port.  These all caused unimagined disruption, but this week, Halloween week, I am thinking about something much worse.  Read More

Views held by tape and disk users are sometimes as divergent as those between dog owners and cat lovers.  Unlike the often disastrous mix of cats and dogs under one roof, however, the side-by-side deployment of disk and tape in a single data center can be very beneficial. Read More

Dear Ms. Meade:

Did you read about the recent breakthrough[1]in tape technology—up to 50 TB per LTO tape? I was also “excited about the recently announced 3TB Seagate hard^[2] drive, but if tape devices can go to 50TB imagine what kind of hard drives we'll have in a few years time.” Read More

I just finished re-reading Keith Schultz’s recent article, which is a test lab review of three different deduplication appliances on the market today.  Spectra nTier Deduplication was one of the three. I always like to read reviews about my products, especially when they are positive.  If you have not read it, I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but will tell you that InfoWorld found that all the systems……. worked.  As much as I wish my deduplication appliance was the only one that worked, I must remain honest.  Most, if not all, mainstream deduplication solutions carry out their primary goal:  reducing your data.    Read More

Who cares about a green data center?

Really?  Not in the negative sense as in, “Who the heck cares about a green data center?” but in the simple sense of, “Who is it exactly that cares about reducing power consumption in the data center?”  Read More

In Aesop’s fable a boy cried wolf and wasn’t believed.  The same can be said for those naysayers who’ve been preaching that, “Tape’s dead.”  What on earth are they thinking? Read More