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.

2) Customer Wins: The year 2019 brought about several deployments of Spectra storage solutions to important customers, including STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Tennis Australia, to name but a few. Case studies were also published for previous Spectra technology installations at the University of Notre Dame and University of Bristol. 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.

To celebrate the season, Spectra also held its annual holiday party. Hosted at the company’s Boulder, Colorado headquarters. The event featured contributions from every department, who created rooms depicting different Hollywood movies. Spectra employees and their loved ones enjoyed seven different parties throughout the building, moving from room to room to devour movie-themed hors d’oeuvres, desserts and libations. The celebrations included floating candles, flying snitches and fake tattoos in the Harry Potter room, sherbet punch and an exploding gopher in the Caddyshack room, and heart-shaped cookies ‘two’ sizes too small in the Grinch room. 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

More than 80 percent of data is being stored on the wrong tier of storage, costing organizations millions of dollars a year. The cost benefit of managing data to different storage targets based on usage is generally well accepted in the data storage industry, and modern storage lifecycle management software can be used to reduce the overall cost of storing data by up to 70 percent. However, organizations can be hesitant to put their data on these lower-cost storage locations because it may be difficult to identify and move the inactive data.

When users are not sure what data has gone cold on primary storage, it is difficult to decide which data to move to what storage tier.To make informed decisions as to what data they would like to offload from primary storage, users need knowledge of the data they already have. Spectra Logic’s storage lifecycle management software solution, StorCycle, solves these challenges with its ability to identify inactive data based on user-defined policies. Read More

Tiered storage is generally accepted as the prime methodology to reduce data storage costs and improve storage efficiency. Its objective is to minimize storage costs by storing data on a range of different storage media that balance performance, functionality and capacity needs.

Traditionally, data storage has been defined by the technology leveraged to protect data using a hierarchical pyramid structure, with the top of the pyramid designated for SSD to store ‘hot’ data, SATA HDDs used to store ‘warm’ data and tape used for the base of the pyramid to archive ‘cold’ data.

A New Storage Paradigm Read More

The Spectra Logic Channel Program boasts over 800 worldwide channel partners. Spectra’s attention to these partnerships and dedicated business relationships have helped drive the success of its solutions in markets across the globe. The company’s channel activities, strategy and growth have been recognized for their excellence by prestigious industry awards multiple years in a row.

Spectra Logic understands the channel’s essential role in helping customers build modern data storage infrastructures and Spectra continues to forge new strategic relations that expand its technology partnerships, distribution and value added reseller (VAR) opportunities worldwide. Read More

Data-driven organizations have large amounts of digital assets that are critical to their businesses and are growing exponentially. That’s because organizations are finding new ways to use data they collect to further their goals. In 2018 alone, 97.2 percent of organizations reportedly invested in big data and artificial intelligence.

Why is it then that many still stress over the growth of data? Given that data is now widely accepted as the single greatest asset of any given organization, it seems that data growth should be a point of anticipation. The main reasons for contention seem to be the cost of storage solutions, hardware footprint and the management of the physical storage itself. So how can organizations leverage data management to maximize efficiencies, create further value and bring down storage costs? And what barriers stand in their way today? Read More

As the expansion of data continues to accelerate, organizations face an ever-increasing need to find affordable, creative solutions to the problem of long-term data retention and protection. Most IT administrators are caught between a rock and a hard place. They are running out of space on their expensive, high performing storage systems, but simply don’t have the budget to increase the size of those systems to accommodate the extreme performance required by today’s business applications, as well as for the economical long-term data preservation.

Behind this problem is an alarming reality: According to Storage Switzerland, roughly 80% of the world’s data typically lives on the wrong tier of storage. This is data that is still considered important enough to keep, but isn’t active, or being actively accessed. The typical IT administrator has neither the time, staff or resources to make a detailed study of their entire dataset to understand what has to stay on that high performing tier and what can be moved off to a Perpetual Tier of storage. Read More