Tenth Consecutive Year of Profitability for Spectra Logic

Spectra Logic Corporation announced its tenth consecutive year of profitability at the close of calendar year 2016.

Spectra Logic’s success is rooted in investing in R&D to build and improve its archive solutions, creating tailored solutions for key verticals that incorporate software and hardware to solve customer workflow and management issues, and focusing on digital preservation that protects customer data forever, while minimizing impact on business processes. Tape’s technological advancements strengthened in 2016, with enhancements in capacity, roadmap, density and data integrity.

Spectra solutions saw improvements, including:

• Spectra enterprise tape libraries are 160% faster and at least 400% more reliable, are performing with 100% up-time, and use less power than previous models. Tape drive roadmaps are doubling in capacity every two years, providing a cost-effective storage solution available with up to 10 times more storage capacity for the cost of equivalent disk systems.
• The TFinity ExaScale Tape Library with highest capacity was introduced and is a tape library system supporting all three tape drive technologies. The TFinity ExaScale, T950 and Spectra T380 tape libraries are all compatible with LTO, IBM TS1140 and TS1150, and Oracle’s StorageTek T10000x tape technology.
• The BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway, an S3 gateway to tape solutions, bridges object storage with the cost effectiveness, longevity and portability of tape.
• In 2016, Spectra Logic introduced nine products or major integrations, and 12 patents were issued to the company.
  

“Spectra Logic prospers through its assured stance that all roads lead to tape, as tape libraries are the ideal choice for deep storage environments,” said Fred Moore, president,  Horison Information Strategies. “Tape-based solutions will continue to be the prime platform for storage and archive of large data sets-particularly in HPC and cloud provider environments. No other vendor except for Spectra has the level of commitment or breadth of entry-level to enterprise tape library offerings.“

As digital data sets grow and require longer retention periods, businesses continue to deploy tape. Simultaneously, organizations in every market are demanding on-premise, long-term storage and archive. Spectra Logic again recorded increases in bookings year-over-year across its key vertical industries, including government, HPC, media and entertainment, video surveillance and public cloud infrastructure.

“The storage industry is in the midst of a growth period in scale-out storage adoption and object storage implementation. Meanwhile, customers are also seeking exceptional archive solutions for long-term digital preservation and data protection,” said Nathan Thompson, Spectra Logic’s CEO. “Spectra is responding to these market needs with a vertical market solution approach coupled with continuous product innovation to ensure the delivery of scalable solutions that satisfy customer requirements.“

BlackPearl Enhancements
In 2016, the BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway continued to thrive at the center of Spectra’s hybrid storage ecosystem strategy. BlackPearl deployments combined with Spectra Tape Library and ArcticBlue solutions expanded in multiple markets. The firm extended its BlackPearl family with both its entry-level BlackPearl V Series and the BlackPearl P Series models. Additionally, the company announced several feature enhancements to BlackPearl, a converged storage platform, including multi-site replication, advanced bucket management (policy-based multi-copy), public cloud storage with AWS and others as well as adding a front-end NAS storage option.

Spectra also expanded its BlackPearl client compatibility certification matrix with direct integration to AVID Interplay MAM, CatDV, Cyberduck, eMAM, Imagen, Marquis and Vizrt for the media and entertainment market. It increased traction into the HPC market with CEPH, Globus/GridFTP, GPFS and Lustre integrations. 150 BlackPearl clients are in various states of development by Spectra Logic and its partners.

Spectra built several extensions to the software development tool kit, and BlackPearl Eon Browser, formerly known as the BlackPearl Deep Storage Browser. The Eon Browser allows users to graphically move files and groups of files to and from BlackPearl and from Windows, Linux and Mac environments.

Spectra Verde NAS Solution Enhancements
Designed for a variety of workloads for as low as 7.5c per GB, a single Verde solution supports three different disk drive types, including 4TB, 8TB and 12TB enterprise drives; 8TB archive drives; and flash-based SSD drives. Additional Verde enhancements include Komprise certification as a tier 1 offload solution, and our Verde Network File Interface (NFI) provides a connection directly to BlackPearl.