SpectraLogic has announced a Spectra Digital Archive offering for on-premises archiving using its StorCycle, Black Pearl and tape library products.
StorCycle is SpectraLogic file/object lifecycle management software that scans primary on-premises or public cloud storage and moves older, less-accessed data from primary storage tiers to less expensive ones, such as nearline disk (NAS or object), tape, or archive storage tiers in the public cloud – both AWS and Azure. BlackPearl is a hybrid flash/disk, front-end cache that stores files as objects on back-end tape devices. Spectra’s tape library products include the TFinity line which can hold an exabyte or more of data.
David Feller, SpectraLogic VP of product management and solutions engineering, said: “Organizations are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the size, scope and cost of their data growth. We designed the Spectra Digital Archive… to help data-driven customers easily and affordably manage, preserve and access this data by migrating it seamlessly to less costly storage tiers for long-term digital preservation, usage and monetization.”
The Spectra Digital Archive offering doesn’t do anything more than what is already available from Spectra. Indeed, StorCycle is already positioned to be used as a kind of ingest gateway for Spectra’s secondary and tertiary storage tiers. These can be either on-premises, in the form of BlackPearl and tape respectively, or in the public cloud.
SpectraLogic CEO and founder Nathan Thompson told us: “To date, over 90 percent of StorCycle installations have been in the paired software and hardware configuration. It’s become apparent that it’s a unique offering from Spectra so we wanted to make our customers aware of this combination of products that solve the management and archival of massive amounts of data, including software, hardware, professional services and support, all from one organization.
“When StorCycle was announced we thought the use case would largely be for archiving to public clouds, but our market experience has shown more interest in long-term, on-prem archival. Making Spectra Digital Archive available as a complete solution simplifies the design and buying process for our channel and this segment of customers.”
New product features are coming: “We will be adding a number of features and capabilities to the total solution over the next six to 18 months.”
One of the existing capabilities is project archiving. When an organization completes a project, all of its files and directories can be archived as a grouped entity and managed and accessed at that level. We can imagine that could be an appreciated on-premises archive feature.
In general, Spectra has just announced it’s upping its archiving game. Competitors such as XenData, PoINT Software and Quantum with its ActiveScale product line, are on notice that Spectra is gunning for the on-prem archive software and hardware market.
