With the advent of StorCycle, Spectra Logic has introduced a new storage tier known as the Perpetual Tier – shown in the diagram below. The Perpetual Tier complements an organization’s existing Primary Tier of storage and provides lower-cost storage options, including public/private cloud, NAS, object storage disk and tape. StorCycle leverages metadata to help administrators identify and migrate inactive data into the Perpetual Tier, leading to cost savings and high data integrity and safety, all while leaving data easily accessible and searchable.

The Primary Tier holds all active data and is most commonly composed of flash, NVMe and high-performance disk drives, in order to achieve the performance required for workflows associated with highly active data. Combined with the Perpetual Tier, StorCycle can ensure that data is stored on the most pragmatic storage medium possible – whether that means storing a long-term copy in an offsite data vault or maintaining a copy on the fastest SSD tier allowable. The Perpetual Tier is used for secondary storage, distribution, backup, archive, and disaster recovery. By reducing data on the Primary Tier, dedicated to performance, smart organizations can configure the more economical Perpetual Tier to be as responsive as their workflows demand.

An important principal of the Perpetual Tier is data integrity and safety. Because data stored in the Perpetual Tier is not part of the typical backup process used in the Primary Tier, keeping multiple copies of data in multiple locations is critical to reduce the likelihood that the data will be lost. StorCycle makes it easy to set up policies to store data in the Perpetual Tier in this manner. To help organizations understand how well their data is protected, StorCycle assigns a Perpetual Score* indicating how well the system is operating and how well the data is protected based on the policies that are created and used. The Perpetual Score will change based on a number of different factors including: Backup of the StorCycle database, amount of available capacity in the Perpetual Tier to move data to, number of copies being made, geographic separation of data sets, and existence of a diverse media policy to store different copies on different types of media. For more information on ways to protect data and understand the options available, download a copy of “Society’s Genome.” This book, authored by Spectra CEO Nathan Thompson, provides a deep dive into different storage retention options and best practices to ensure your data is always accessible.
*Perpetual Score available in a future release