If ever there was a time for organizations to become more effective and efficient, that time is now.  With the economic impact of COVID-19, organizations are looking to reduce expenditures while continuing to advance their operations. For organizations that are reliant on data to further their business efforts, there is no way to stem the flow of that data and its ongoing growth. Despite these challenges, many organizations continue to store all of their active and inactive data on an expensive primary storage system. And, when the system capacity fills up, they spend a large chunk of their IT budget buying another node of primary storage. Then another. Read More

Ron Gerber, CEO of Angelbeat, recently interviewed Spectra’s Chris Shannon on the evolution of Spectra Logic, its storage offerings and its intelligent storage lifecycle management software, StorCycle, which helps organizations deal with data growth and budget constraints by migrating less active data from primary storage to a more affordable Perpetual Tier.

Ron and Chris kicked off the interview by discussing Spectra’s company culture, what it means to be a customer-driven company in the data storage industry and the unique perspective Spectra brings to the market as an innovative “40-year startup”. Read More

These are unprecedented times. And there has never been a more important time than now for IT professionals to depend on trusted vendors, partners, suppliers and technology for ways to maintain business continuity and digital preservation. For more than 40 years, Spectra has been helping its customers solve their most pressing data storage and data management challenges. A key part of this strategy has been our dedication to the advancement of the industry’s most cost-effective, reliable and established choice for archiving and preserving massive amounts of data – tape technology.

Tested and deployed for more than 60 years, tape technology continues to evolve to meet the mounting hurdles of storing, accessing and preserving petabytes of data.  With long roadmaps and hundreds of technological improvements, such as advances in media substrates and coatings, tape technology and tape libraries today are poised for a strong and enduring future. In fact, tape continues to be deployed by many of the largest brands in the world. And cloud service providers recognize the advantages that tape technology offers over other technologies for large-scale data archiving, including tape’s lower cost, higher reliability, reduced power consumption, longer archive life and lower total cost of ownership. Read More

In an article recently posted to the FST Blog, Philippe Nicolas, consultant and lead analyst with Coldago, describes Spectra’s new storage lifecycle management software, StorCycle^®. Nicolas defines StorCycle as a sophisticated and modern software that generates economy for primary storage backup and reduces cost of Primary Tier as volume is optimized. He notes that Spectra promotes a two-tier model with a first tier being the Primary Tier for production data and the second tier named the Perpetual Tier with various devices and entities between tape libraries, NAS, object storage and even cloud storage with an S3 API protocol exposed. Read More

Introducing SpectraLIVE: Spectra Logic’s Virtual Conference and Meeting Program to Help Your Business Continuity

With all tradeshows and group meetings canceled around the globe, Spectra introduced a new virtual conference and meeting program called SpectraLIVE to provide our customers and visitors with numerous opportunities to connect, engage, learn and interact with Spectra leadership and product managers virtually.

Our first SpectraLIVE Virtual Conference will take place on Tuesday, May 12, 2020, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. MST. This event will enable attendees to hear about the latest market trends, learn about Spectra solutions, ask questions, share feedback, watch product demonstrations, and meet with Spectra executives. Spectra will be recording this for our SpectraLIVE library, so visitors can attend one or all presentations live or on-demand at their convenience. Read More

Backup and Archive – what is the difference? In essence, backups provide organizations with business continuity.  A backup creates a secondary copy of a data set to protect against data loss and provides the ability to restore a system quickly to a previous state. Backups typically increase the need for storage capacity by creating multiple copies of Primary Tier data. Designed for quick recovery, backups are a way to protect active data that is stored on the primary storage system. In contrast, archiving involves moving data to a lower cost repository rather than copying. Archive is meant to keep data for the long-term and accessible for future reference – for instance, a company may archive completed projects, inactive and aging data, or data that is required to be stored for a certain period of time due to regulations. Archives protect data by making multiple copies of the migrated data, often on multiple storage mediums, and in multiple storage locations. Read More

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.

Imagine a post-production studio supporting advertising agencies, creating high-performing commercials for television and mobile streaming across a number of countries. A single commercial can create upwards of 50TB to 100TB, with 10 to 15 final versions presented for selection to the client agency. It’s also not uncommon for studios to create daily views for review showing a collage of everything filmed in a day. An average client can easily demand an output of 500TB to 1PB per year. All of the input must be kept as well, and the ratios of raw footage to finished product can reach staggering levels of upwards of 1200:1.  To remain competitive in the M & E industry, it’s imperative that all content from a project, commercial or film is preserved as a single project for future use. 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