As media organizations find themselves acquiring, creating, and distributing greater amounts of content, they also find themselves faced with mounting pressure on their traditional or existing storage platforms. Budgets are hit when production storage becomes burdened by more and more content.

A progressive and cost-effective storage solution keeps up with demands and helps offload primary storage where possible. When considering a modern solution, one must keep in mind how quickly and frequently they need to access their assets. Cloud options do exist but are limited in their speed of delivery and do not provide cost-effective means for storing frequently accessed media. Spinning disk has become more affordable, but it is still expensive to retain content that is not accessed on a regular basis, and worse for assets associated with a finished project residing on primary storage. read more

Last week in Part One of “Comparing Storage Technologies: Pros, Cons and Future Predictions,” I discussed the pros and cons of solid-state storage and magnetic disk, and shared predictions for where Spectra believes the two technologies are headed. This week, I will cover two additional technologies: Tape and Optical Disc.

3. Tape: Tape has been around for more than 40 years and the need for tape in the long-term archive market continues to grow. Digital tape for secondary storage however has been experiencing a year to year decline and some small tape systems are being displaced by cloud storage solutions. read more

Serving a market sector of more than $35 billion, the storage device industry has exhibited constant innovation and improvement. In this two-part blog, we will discuss the pros and cons of current technologies being utilized in the storage market as well as Spectra’s predictions for where these technologies are headed in the coming years.

1. Solid State (Flash): NAND flash, or solid-state storage, is currently the fastest growing technology in the storage market. On the high end, flash is gaining ground for database applications. On the low end, flash is rapidly replacing small hard disks and is considered the de facto technology for digital cameras, smart phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers.
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Recent technological updates to the Spectra® Verde® NAS Solution, as well as our NAS capabilities overall, are enabling Spectra to more efficiently address unique customer challenges. In my first blog, Customer Use Cases for Spectra Logic NAS: Part One, I discussed a use case where Verde’s new SSD pool feature is allowing a Video on Demand (VoD) provider to increase its service offering. In part two, I’d like to discuss two additional use cases for Spectra’s newly upgraded NAS.

Use Case 2: Video Surveillance End User Implements Verde NAS Solution to Meet Increased Retention Requirements read more

Spectra recently made some technological upgrades to its Spectra® Verde® NAS Solution, as well as its NAS capabilities overall. These new updates required only simple changes to our hardware and software offering, but are already having a profound effect on how Spectra is able to address unique customer challenges. In this blog, I’d like to discuss a few use cases for Spectra’s newly upgraded NAS, and how it can be used to solve several common customer dilemmas being faced by real users out in the field today. read more

Earlier this week at Globus World 2017 in Chicago, Spectra Logic announced in a press release that its BlackPearl Converged Storage System is now certified with Globus. The companies have been working closely together for some time to bring archive and backup solutions to a wide array of High Performance Computing, Higher Education and non-profit organizations.

Also released this week, was a case study outlining the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute’s (MSI’s) Spectra Logic-Globus solution. Following a grant application, the University of Minnesota chose a Spectra T950 with LTO-7 media and a Spectra BlackPearl with Globus Software to replace an aging system and boost reliability in their backup and HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) processes. read more

Over the past decade, the volume of surveillance video being recorded, indexed, and stored has increased significantly. There are multiple operational demands driving this increase, as well as the widespread demand for video surveillance.

Primary drivers include:

• Growth in security programs since 9/11
• Recognition that video surveillance replaces the need to send people into remote or dangerous locations
• New technology innovations, such as 4K video, IR/thermal systems, and reliable wireless connectivity

This last point indicates that the demand for video is unlikely to slow any time soon. Drones and bodycams are just beginning to have an impact on physical security operations. Traffic management, license plate identification, and facial recognition represent entirely new security applications that require constant flows of high-quality video to be effective. More than 60 million cameras are now installed worldwide, and nearly half of those cameras are already high-definition (HD) compatible. HD cameras are quickly becoming the norm, with 4K systems soon to become mainstream. read more

What is the difference between “data resiliency” and “data protection?” Both terms relate to digitally preserving organizational assets in the event of a natural disaster or data center corruption, however their means of doing so vary. The main discrepancy between the two really relates back to the cloud.

Data Resiliency
The term “data resiliency” refers to data’s ability to “spring back” in situations where it is compromised. In the cloud, data is resilient because it can be stored in a number of different locations. No one location is better than the other, availability is just improved by the more places data is stored, specifically in the event a location goes down or the data becomes corrupted. Users have access to data so long as the location they are storing their data at is accessible and the data isn’t compromised. If the one location goes down, users are directed to the second location. If all locations go down, then the organization no longer has access to its data. read more

By: Sarah Clews, WW Product Marketing Manager, Backup, Recovery and Archive (BURA), HPE Storage

Brian Grainger, CSO, Spectra Logic

In November 2016, Spectra Logic and HPE announced a new partnership – with the news that HPE will resell Spectra Logic’s enterprise-level tape libraries, the HPE T950 and the HPE TFinity® ExaScale Edition. By combining forces, HPE and Spectra provide the market with reliable and affordable enterprise tape storage solutions that address all of the requirements of customers who are managing extremely large data sets – often in HPC environments. read more

Portions of Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, one of the world’s largest computing and storage companies, went offline Tuesday afternoon, impacting millions of companies across the world.

AWS provides cloud-based storage and web services for organizations looking for a virtual environment as opposed to the physical hardware infrastructure of on-premise solutions. For example, a post- production organization might store its videos, images or databases on an AWS server to be accessed, transcoded, and distributed via the Internet. read more