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Spectra Logic Collaborates with Premier U.S. Research and Development Laboratory on Open-Source Application Now Available on GitHub

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Spectra Logic firmly believes that collaboration and partnership are a great source of opportunity and improvement in business. In fact, Spectra’s business development team works closely with customers and ecosystem and channel partners alike to plan, develop and deliver the company’s solutions. Spectra is considered a trusted-advisor to many of the world’s key data storage users and has become a true partner to its customers – accommodating requests spanning from new code creation to feature enhancements.

In that vein, Spectra has published several open-source software projects in public repositories to share code with the data storage community. The company’s platform of choice to make such developments available is GitHub, a web-based hosting service used by over 36 million developers worldwide and more than 2.1 million businesses and organizations. For example, software like Spectra’s Eon Browser, a free open-source interface to move files between local storage and the Spectra® BlackPearl® Converged Storage System, has been placed in a publicly accessible repository on GitHub so anyone can download it, see the source code, and submit suggested enhancements. As it currently stands, Spectra has contributed over 37 repositories to GitHub, all of which are licensed to permit modifications and redistribution of its source code. Read More

2019 Take Your Dog to Work Day at Spectra Logic

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Spectra employees in Boulder celebrated the 21st annual ‘Take Your Dog to Work Day’ by bringing their furry friends into the office on Friday, June 21. The event, first established in 1999, was created by Pet Sitters International to encourage businesses to allow dogs in the workplace for one day each year to celebrate the great buddies that dogs make and promote adoptions from local shelters, rescue groups and humane societies. Take Your Dog to Work Day is always celebrated on the Friday following Father’s Day. Media coverage and web traffic indicate growing support of and participation in the event across the U.S. and abroad. Read More

A New Approach to Storage for Media and Entertainment: The Two-Tier Model

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Spectra Perpetual Tiered Storage Header

Part three of three – Perpetual Object Storage Systems

In the previous two blogs in this series, we discussed the two-tier paradigm in content storage systems, and dove deep into the first tier known as project/production. In this blog, we’ll explore the perpetual tier. As mentioned earlier, the first tier (project/production) is file-based. The second tier, or perpetual tier, is object-based, and is designed to be a landing zone where digital assets persist over time. The perpetual tier stores raw content with any associated managed assets that require sharing across a team so the content is always available for future work, including editing, color grading, music scoring, visual effects, etc. As newer versions of assets are created, prior versions are kept on the perpetual tier for safekeeping. Read More

A New Approach to Storage for Media and Entertainment: The Two-Tier Model

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Media Assets

Part two of three – Production Storage File Systems

The volume of digital assets created each day by media and entertainment (M & E) organizations continues to grow exponentially over time and shows no sign of slowing down. A two-tier paradigm in content storage systems enables the project tier production storage to use high bandwidth file storage for editing and shared content access while leveraging the perpetual tier for all content that does not require active editing, use or consumption. We presented a high-level introduction to the new two-tier storage model in part one of this blog series here. The active editing and use of data requires high performance systems such as Alcestor, Pure Storage and Qumulo. Read More

A New Approach to Storage for Media and Entertainment: The Two-Tier Model

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Media content storage

Part one of three – Introducing the Two-Tier Model in M & E

Content is the lifeblood of media and entertainment organizations. Content growth, ever increasing raw and edited file sizes and greater resolutions — 4K and 8K formats, virtual reality, augmented reality and high dynamic range — have placed tremendous pressure on storage systems. The modern media organization demands collaboration like never before, meaning timely multi-site access to assets is crucial to success. Furthermore, content workflows rely on efficient analysis and search capabilities, with organizations often requiring multiple workflows within a single infrastructure, exceeding the functionality of the traditional filesystem. Increasing scale, level of collaboration and diversity of workflows are driving the industry toward a new model for media storage. Read More

2019 Bring Your Child to Work Day at Spectra Spelled Fun for Everyone

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Once a year, the children of the Spectra Logic team get a glimpse into what their parents do while they are at work. At this year’s Spectra Bring Your Child to Work Day, more than 50 kids attended and were treated to a day of education and memorable experiences. In addition to learning about what their parents do at Spectra, the children enjoyed many exciting activities at the company’s Boulder headquarters. Needless to say, it was a lively day! The annual event is organized by Spectra’ SUMMIT, a women-led organization within Spectra Logic that fosters an enhanced culture of diversity at the company. Many Spectra employees volunteer to help generate ideas and run activities. Below are a few highlights from the event. Read More

The 2019 NAB Show Buzz – Ideas to Follow Post-Conference

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NAB Show 2019 Header

Another eventful NAB Show is behind us. Once again, the media and entertainment masses ascended upon warm Las Vegas to attend the industry’s largest tradeshow, the National Association of Broadcasters, to learn about new technologies and trends, in the hopes of gaining a leg up on the competition. There were four main buzzes in the Spectra Logic booth to be noted: Cloud, BlackPearl, migration and integration.

Cloud

Everyone is all about the cloud, and it was no different at NAB. So what exactly is it? Plain and simple, its hosting. Cloud is someone else hosting your applications, your computing your storage, etc., on a device somewhere else via https.  Essentially, it means users don’t have to own hardware or physical space to accommodate processing or storage. Including cloud as part of a hybrid storage strategy is commonplace today. Spectra’s BlackPearl hybrid storage ecosystem accommodates cloud mandates by creating a storage environment that stores content both locally, on-premise, as well as in the public cloud. The mix of storing assets on-premise and in the public cloud provides layers of protection for content and the most effective means to accessing assets affordably when they are needed. Read More

Tape Robot Provides Data Storage Solutions for the Next Decade

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What do you do when you need to increase the space available for storing vast amounts of data? One solution is to install a high-capacity automated tape library or ‘Tape Robot’.

​STFC’s Scientific Computing Department (SCD) needed to increase its capacity for storing and managing the vast and ever-growing amounts of data from the JASMIN Facility1 (environment and climate data) and through IRIS ​2 (astronomy, particle physics, and data from national facilities such as ISIS Neutron Source, Diamond Light Source and the Central Laser Facility).

The extra capacity needed to be at least 60 petabytes (PB) – the equivalent of storing more than 10 million DVDs – with the potential to increase again to meet future data demands.

Installed within STFC’s Scientific Data Centre at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), the new Spectra TFinity Tape Library has an initial capacity of 65PB, 48 Drive Bays and a mix of 17 industry open standard LTO-8 (Linear Tape Open) drives and 16 TS1160 drives – recent technology which will enable future expansion. Read More

Spectra Logic Just Made It Even Easier for Customers to Use BlackPearl

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To this date, hundreds of Spectra Logic customers have implemented our BlackPearl® Converged Storage System to affordably store data long-term. Spectra’s BlackPearl is a purpose-built storage platform that integrates directly with ”data mover” software applications to simplify workflows and seamlessly manage large volumes of data to multiple storage targets. BlackPearl includes an S3-like interface to move data into its object storage on cloud, disk and tape. In order to help even more customers meet their long-term storage needs, Spectra has recently introduced another, easier system for transferring files into BlackPearl. This new system is called Spectra RioBroker. The announcement, made yesterday, can be read here. Read More

BlackPearl Object Storage Disk, Powered by BlackPearl

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ArcticBlue Low storage total cost of ownership image

While the cost of NAND is declining and the enterprise storage market moves its top tier of storage to flash, Spectra Logic is innovating the exact fit and place for spinning hard disk drives (HDDs) in a tiered storage environment. Its BlackPearl® Object Storage Disk solution, powered by the Spectra® BlackPearl® Converged Storage System, excels at long-term, high-throughput storage in the only platform that is highly complementary to tape. BlackPearl Object Storage Disk’s unique features differentiate it and the BlackPearl platform from any other storage system in the market. This blog will outline a few nuances that are easy to miss, but that emphasize BlackPearl Object Storage Disk’s particular breed of online, object-based disk storage. Read More