A few days ago I attended Spectrasummit, the annual event that Spectra Logic organizes for analysts, journalists and bloggers. It’s my third year in a row at this event and I have to say that it has always been worthwhile.
A (different) tape company
Tape vendors are very few in number now: Oracle (StorageTek), IBM and Spectra Logic (anyone else?). The market is quite static and the only thing that actually happens each other year is a new tape generation (just more space and throughput)… and that’s it.
Spectra does have some interesting products though, like the Tfinity which is a particular tape library that can be “scaled-out” and become huge (and I mean really huge!), while occupying less floor space than comparable configurations from the competition. And, at this level tape is all about efficiency and savings.
Tape libraries are still Spectra’s most substantial source of revenue, but the company is evolving year after year into something much more compelling than a tape library vendor.
Beyond tape
Two years ago Spectra presented a really interesting product: BlackPearl. It’s an appliance capable of exposing a tape-optimized S3-compatible interface, transforming their tape libraries in a sort of Object store for long term storage. Brilliant!
The product was immature at the beginning. But it has evolved and a lot of features, caching mechanisms and high availability have been added making it a very powerful and robust solution.
This year they put the icing on the cake with the introduction of ArcticBlue, a high density array with a set of particular features (including a hard disk power down functionality and erasure coding ) aimed to provide high power efficiency and longevity while maintaining the best possible availability and resiliency. And again, this is integrated with BlackPearl.
The deep storage company
Calling Spectra Logic just a tape library company is pretty unfair now. They are one of the few deep storage companies out there (the only one with an end-to-end solution maybe) and they are building a strong line-up of products to do that.
The profound knowledge they have about libraries and tapes (a media that can last 25/30 years) put them in a unique position to develop next generation products like BlackPearl or ArcticBlue. In fact, the list of partners leveraging their technology is quite long now and they can easily play as a second tier for all those OBS vendors out there with Tiering-to-the-cloud capabilities (HDS HCP, NetApp StorageGRID, Cloudian Hyperstore and so on).
With a full featured Object Storage platform in the front-end and Spectra Logic at the back-end it’s not difficult to build a competitive on-premises Glacier-like infrastructure for cold data.
Bottom line
Spectra Logic is a very interesting company and I like them! Humble and brilliant, capable of being competitive and innovative in a very conservative market where the other players are Oracle and IBM (with all the leverage they have on their customers!)
Their vision regarding deep storage is quite complete and their product line-up is growing very well. I could describe it as “exciting” if it weren’t for the fact that we’re talking about cold storage here 😉 (ok, I know I’m not good with jokes).
Disclaimer: I was invited to this meeting by Spectra Logic and they paid for travel and accommodation, I have not been compensated for my time and am not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or edited by any other person than the Juku team.
Yes, when Spectra Logic released the BlackPearl appliance two years ago, I thought it would make a good way to tier data from an AWS S3-compatible object storage cluster, like Cloudian HyperStore, to a LTFS formatted tape library for archival storage. Spectra Logic has stepped up their game by building an architecture around BlackPearl that looks convincing, except for one thing that bothers me. In order to do erasure coding safely, you need to have the right number of storage server nodes to get the durability you need to protect a specific amount of data. The number of ArcticBlue nodes seems too small to do that, but if its purpose is to function as nearline storage for data already stored in a Spectra Logic tape library, it is probably OK. Like Storiant, ArcticBlue relies on the ZFS file system, and has the ability to power-off most of the HDDs while keeping some minimum number powered-on. I noticed that NetApp has a “Proof of Concept” document on the Spectra Logic website that uses the BlackPearl Deep Storage Gateway and the NetApp StorageGRID Webscale. Vendors like Cloudian, should wake up and take notice that you can also tier to a local deep storage archive technology like BlackPearl connected to a Spectra Logic tape library.