Industry today agrees with the fact that data protection service is a growth opportunity, a lucrative addition to a partner's product portfolio and a critical technology on the IT resiliency landscape. Backup and disaster recovery provisioning are chores that many IT organizations would be happy to offload. The complexity of backup and the fact that the process is error-prone, has made data protection a challenge for organizations of all sizes. With the exorbitant rate of data growth, issues like disaster recovery and legal compliance make data retention necessary and the failure to assure against these risks can be extremely costly, especially for a mid-market company.

For seamless performance and success of enterprises, identifying the right tools for data protection has become extremely important. Spectra Logic, headquartered in Colorado, is helping enterprises integrate these tools without the requirement of an expensive and disruptive overhaul of existing IT infrastructure. The company is making it possible by building on existing data storage and protection equipment. The data storage and protection solutions provider has a continued focus on innovation, with an indomitable spirit of striving to comprehend new technologies which are spurring exciting advancements in storage and solving today's biggest data storage challenges. "One of the biggest changes we have seen recently has been the shift from backing up entire data storage systems to an Active Archive approach that only backs up the most frequently used data. Active Archive allows you to move less frequently accessed data off expensive disk and onto less costly storage. Making two copies, now allows you to reduce the amount of data you need to back up nightly." says Matthew T. Starr, CTO, Spectra Logic.

Cloud Versus Traditional IT

The hesitation many business owners once felt about entrusting their computerized records to an outside entity for storage is fading, as it should. When compared to the immense cost of carving out sufficient on-site storage and hiring the IT professionals who know how to manage it, entrusting the files to cloud storage companies is comparatively stress-free. Cloud storage offerings are a place where SMEs can offload some of their data storage. However, cloud is not the solution for a company that has petabytes of data; nonetheless, for enterprises which have a few terabytes to handle, it provides an offsite, unique genome hardware platform that can be used for archive or backup. The smaller data sets initially stored in the cloud could tolerate the disk-only model. However, as data sets grew, the disk-only infrastructure became brittle. Spectra Logic, through its products, has proved that the inclusion of tape is in many ways the single biggest change since the early days of cloud architectures. Spectra Logic ships both simply affordable disk-based file solutions and tape libraries targeted at backup, archive and cloud computing to Indian companies in many vertical markets. Some of Spectra Logic's largest T950 and T-Finity enterprise-class tape library installations are based in India, across vertical markets such as media and entertainment, high-performance computing, government and aerospace. Some of its current customers by vertical market include: The Centre for Mathematical Modeling and Computer Simulation, or CMMACS (government and HPC); TATA Motors (manufacturing); Sony TV (media & entertainment); and Goodrich Aerospace (aerospace).

Industry-First Technologies

Spectra invests a high percentage of its revenue into Research & Development in the backup and archive space. This investment allows Spectra to introduce innovative new features and products that are changing the landscape of backup and archive. Spectra Logic has introduced dozens of industry-first technologies over the course of its 30-year history, and currently holds 76 United States patents. Most recently, Spectra introduced the nTier Verde disk-based file storage appliance and the BlackPearl deep storage appliance for public and private cloud environments.

Spectra nTier Verde provides simply affordable file storage. Being reliable and easy to use, it requires no previous storage experience to deploy or manage, and it is half the cost of traditional file storage. The company is seeing excellent demand for this product, which integrates seamlessly in environments with Spectra's tape libraries. The BlackPearl deep storage appliance is part of Spectra's vision to deliver a massively scalable deep storage tier that can store data virtually forever, for pennies per gigabyte. The BlackPearl appliance offers a RESTful, object-based interface to deep storage by leveraging the new DS3 interface and acts as an intelligent intermediary between online and deep storage environments.

An evident trend today is of a much wider adoption of object stores, both cloud based and also inside the data center. Object Stores will allow file storage scale into the 10s and even 100s of petabytes. Spectra Logic's roadmap includes the introduction of such new technologies and products that tackle object storage management and address extreme scalability. With over 30 years of experience in storage, the company has a goal to develop high-density, feature-rich storage products with unmatched service and support to customers worldwide.