Children Share Their Impressions from Spectra Logic's Bring Your Child to Work Day Celebration

Last week, over 70 children attended Spectra Logic's "Bring Your Child to Work Day" celebration. This year marked the 20th anniversary of this event and Spectra Logic has participated since its inception.

At Spectra Logic's event, children don't just follow mom or dad around the office, they are exposed to a fun-filled, educational adventure. Throughout the day children participated in a variety of events from tours, to trade shows to interviews and educational workshops. There was also a little downtime with outdoor games and activities and an ice cream social to top off the day.

We asked the children who participated to share their thoughts and impressions on the event by writing about it for our blog contest.  Sasha Miller won the grand prize, a $25 gift card, and the other entrants won $15 gift cards for their contributions.

Congratulations to all of our guest bloggers!  Here's what they had to say:

Winning Entry (Submitted by Sasha Miller):

"Spectra Logic's Bring Your Child to Work Day was splendid! I learned about all the departments. At registration time, I got my own badge! During the tour, I got to visit building 2, 3, and 4. Most people at Spectra Logic don't know that building 2 and 3 are there. Building 4 is new! When we were at building 4, we saw different rooms! Some rooms were very tight and one was an open floor. The coolest part of building 4 was the crane. We got lifted up, up and away!

"After that was shadow time. I learned all kinds of things. My mom's work is so cool! Outside playtime was a blast! We played sharks and minnows. We even colored! The trade show was awesome. I learned about the machines Spectra Logic makes, advertises and sells. My mom had some prototypes of the things Spectra makes. It is cool how it moves tapes by WiFi. At the last Shadow Time, I answered the questions and I interviewed Matt Lendway and Sara Adams. That's why Bring Your Child to Work Day was wonderful!"

Sasha Miller

 "There's a trade show where I got a lot of candy and a pencil, pen and eraser. And I found where my mom's cube was sooner then she did! She found it in a week and I found it in less then a day. And I got a fold up Frisbee. Also I met a really nice guy who works right next to my mom and his name is Eric Lohmar, he is a very, very good at taking photos. And there is another guy named Terence who works with the Spanish customers and I got to hitch a ride on a conference call and that is only because I speak some Spanish because I go to a bilingual school. By the way my mom is Lisa Kovener and I am in 4th grade and I go to Escuela Bilingue Pioneer. Thank you for having me at Spectra Logic!"

Zoe Bray, 4th Grade, Escuela Bilingue Pioneer

"Bring Your Child to Work Day was so much fun and marvelous! I had such a great time. Everything was very well done and fun. Shadow Time was put together well. It is great that kids like me can meet other people and learn what those people do. It is also very nice that they also supplied food for parents and kids. Everyone needs to eat at some point in the day.

"Why do I think Bring Your Child to Work Day at Spectra was so great? There were so many activities for kids to do and have fun with. First, Spectra put together a breakfast and then we got to go on a tour. Next, we went on Shadow Time with our parent or the older kids, like my brother, got to spend time in Engineering or Manufacturing. After that, we got lunch and then we got to shadow some more. I got to interview people in Marketing. We then had some fun outdoor time and, last, we had an ice cream social.

"Spectra probably put a lot of effort to have their Bring Your Child to Work Day happen.  Also, everyone was nice and polite. They really made sure everyone felt comfortable coming. These are some of the reasons I really enjoyed Bring Your Child to Work Day. I am really happy my mom works at Spectra."

Allison Beasley, age 8, Peak to Peak Charter School

"I went to Spectra Logic's Take Your Child to Work Day with my Mom. When I was there, I noticed they were all just a happy family and everyone worked together. Spectra Logic employees didn't just cooperate, respect each other and other things, but they also gave valuable information that we can use when we get older.  We learned how to make a good first impression at a job interview. We learned about hardware and how to write a computer software program.  When I grow up I want to work at Spectra Logic and just have fun."

Kate Dellett, age 9, Arapahoe Ridge Elementary

"My favorite part was seeing how the libraries moved and how the robots picked up the tapes and put them into the slots. I liked the conference rooms and the ice cream party.  I think I'll be a great engineer and an artist one day."  

Eric Dellett, age 7, Arapahoe Ridge Elementary

NAB 2012 has come and gone, and it was a great show for Spectra Logic!  We had more meetings and booth traffic than ever before.  While a lot of hype was generated from remote controlled helicopters carrying high def cameras and a large presence by GoPro, here are some things that stood out from the vantage point of the Spectra Logic booth:

Attendance was definitely up.  Of the people that came by, most were in a decision-making capacity, which is a good thing for any vendor.

No more drinking the disk Kool-Aid.  The last of the dying breed of disk only users seem to have paid the high cost of that strategy, unfortunately in loss of content.  One customer in particular, who will remain nameless, I remember well from last year when he was very excited that his station had just procured a rather large amount of disk storage to backup their primary – “oh, we’ll be good for a while now” were his words I believe.  I saw him again the first day of the show and this year he says, “We need to talk!” It turns out that large amount of storage he bought for a great price didn’t help him when a software bug started randomly deleting files.  They lost 7,000 titles!

Tape is hot.  Especially in a world of “tapeless” workflows it’s amazing how everyone wants and needs tape.  It appears that more and more people are realizing that data tape, and specifically LTO tape, are a necessary component of most environments.  Whether it’s for delivering media to other facilities where it just doesn’t make sense to send files on external hard drives anymore, or for mass storage where disk just isn’t cost logical, or for plain old data protection (see above), LTO it seems is on everyone’s list when it comes to storage and archive.  There were lots of questions about LTO6 and its impending release and Spectra’s pre-purchase program.  It’s really amazing to see that even with advances in technology where we can now store 1.5TB per LTO cartridge and soon 3TB per cartridge, and the sizes of libraries getting bigger and bigger, the demand is still there for large systems.  We had a couple of tape libraries on the floor that were each over 2,000 slots, or 3PB, and they weren’t big enough for many.  Bottom line -- if you need it, we’ll build it!

LTFS is increasingly a hot topic.  It is a strong wave in the market that more and more vendors are riding on.  Right now we’re certified with all applications that utilize LTFS, but we do not specifically offer an LTFS-based library. What we’ve made sure of though, is that our Media Life Cycle Management (MLM) can be fully utilized to ensure content is available far into the future.  Time will tell how functional and practical LTFS is, but one thing we do hear is that LTFS alone, in its current form, is not suitable to manage assets.  However, I think ultimately the end-user demands will drive vendors to introduce LTFS based solutions. 

Overall NAB was a great show and Spectra Logic looks forward to another great year next year!

Spectra Logic’s Kevin Dudak is a contributing blogger for the Inside Big Data Blog. His most recent post has been reprinted below with permission from Rich Brueckner:

Got Big Data? 4 Things to Look for at the NAB Show

I just got an email from the organizers of the NAB Show in Las Vegas this April about my registration confirmation. I’ve always enjoyed attending this show, as it has a lot of things you don’t see at the typical IT show. How many storage shows have provisions for helicopters to fly in and be displayed?

This show draws a wide cross section of organizations, with lots of educational seminars, as well as vendor displays. What they all have in common is data. The capture side creates the raw data, editors and post-production change the data, and broadcast distributes finished data.

It got me thinking, there is so much to see and do at this show, what do I want to make sure I learn at NAB? I will specifically be looking at four things:

• 4K and Beyond– Video takes space, and HD 1080P video takes lots of space. It has become so easy to capture HD video these days with things like the Go Pro Hero Cam (they should have a cool booth in the Expo Hall), I’ve got hours of footage from bike rides, autocrosses and other events consuming lots of storage. 4K makes 1080P looks small, and there is talk about what follows that. Increases in sensor resolutions will drive bigger video files not just in media, but also in security and other applications. I want to see what is coming, as storage systems need to be ready to hold the additional data.
• Digital Workflow– I think everyone looking at Big Data issues can learn a lot here. M&E has spent several years converting to digital file-based workflow. This means lots of huge, high value files that need to be analyzed for meta data creation, modified, rendered and distributed. Every year, they get a little more efficient at the process, something we can all learn from.
• Storage – Of course, as a storage guy, I am going to be interested in any new ways to use storage. There will be everything from extreme speed storage for playout at broadcast stations to long term archival storage of digital assets. Asset management of the archives ties in here and is equally important. A lot of the problems that are being solved for long term archive today for M&E will have a broader application in the near term.
• Data Movement– How does someone move a Terabyte of data, or a Petabyte securely and with confidence? I am very interested to see how different organizations are solving the data mobility challenge. With 4K video capture becoming more mainstream, and higher resolutions on the horizon, many entertainment companies are a generation or two ahead of the rest of technology users on this front. Lessons learned here will help us all.

There is a lot of potential to learn some interesting things at NAB this year. They are facing the same challenges many Big Data industries are, but they come at it without the preconceived notions of how IT is supposed to work. I think that gives them the potential to create some interesting solutions that can benefit us all.

Spectra Logic’s Kevin Dudak is a contributing blogger for the Inside Big Data Blog. His most recent post, Big Data Software – More Than Just Analytics, has been reprinted below with permission from Rich Brueckner:

Big Data Software – More Than Just Analytics

I noticed a funny thing the other day while on the Storage Networking World website, looking at the different things on the agenda. At the top of the list is the Big Data track the first day of the show. That’s pretty predictable, given everyone seems to be talking about Big Data these days.

Surprisingly, Hadoop isn’t mentioned once in any of the Big Data track session descriptions. Some of the Big Data Track sessions are about Data Analytics, bringing Big Data to the enterprise and where to start with Big Data – in all of this I am sure Hadoop will come up, but it’s interesting it was not mentioned in the titles or descriptions.

At most other events that have a Big Data focus you see Hadoop everywhere. In fact, the feedback from some people that went to the Strata Conference was Hadoop and Big Data are inseparable. It seems that many have begun to believe that Big Data = Hadoop… but does it?

If Big Data equals Hadoop, then Big Data equals Analytics. But Big Data isn’t that simple. Processing, programming, networking and storage have some type of implication to Big Data, and I am sure we will discover many more important aspects over the next year or two.

What were once simple tasks are much more complex when dealing is massive data sets. The impact to storage systems and networks when looking at data protection alone are beyond what most organizations have considered before. With data sets that can now be larger the many disk arrays, migrating to new systems is complex and time consuming.

SNW isn’t focused on Data Scientists, but on storage managers, and while Hadoop will surely be talked about, it won’t be the focus of the day. As time goes on more disciplines will start to look at the implication Big Data plays in their part of the IT ecosystem.

Spectra Logic's Molly Rector recently had the opportunity to contribute an article to Computer Technology Review on the importance of focusing on the data instead of the storage medium when it comes to data storage. She explained how deciding which storage media to use involves many factors including cost, reliability, data integrity and accessibility.

In the article, she also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each storage medium and explains how the key to protecting data is to first understand the merits of the storage media, and second, to focus on the data requirements and usage.

To read more on her perspective here’s a link to her Computer Technology Review article: Focus on the Data, Not the Storage Medium

Spectra Logic’s Kevin Dudak recently became a contributing blogger for the Inside Big Data  Blog. His first post Thinking About Big Data on the Eve of Spring Trade Show Season has been reprinted below with permission from Rich Brueckner:

Thinking about Big Data on the eve of the spring trade show season

The month of March brings longer days, warmer weather and the start of the spring trade show season.  There seem to be as many trade shows as there are interest and industries.  Last year, we saw a lot of people start talking about Big Data at these shows.  The trend most likely will continue, with Big Data taking a bigger share of the conversation.  

Given the years I have been in the storage industry, it should come as no surprise that I tend to look at the storage part of Big Data.  Over the last year we have heard a lot about the analytics side of Big Data.  It is exciting seeing all the amazing things we can do, and things we can learn from the massive amount of data we have at our finger tips these days.  Without a doubt, we will continue to see much of the conversation focus on leveraging our data sets with tools like Hadoop.  Sometimes, it seems we forget that Big Data is more than just the analytics; it is also about storing and managing potentially massive data sets.  2012 will see users and vendors starting to address the changes Big Data brings to storage.

The 2012 Tape Summit and the HPC Symposium kick off the season.    The second annual Tape Summit is the gathering of top manufactures in the Data Tape, including drive, library, software and media companies; as well as press, analysts and bloggers.  You don’t see tape and Big Data in the same conversation too often, but I think the tape industry will be looking to change that this year.  We will be hearing about Linear Tape File System (LTFS,) continued innovation in data management software and possibly the coming LTO6 and how all of these can have a big impact on storing lots of data.

The HPC Symposium will see presentations from some of the top organizations in the distributed high performance world.  Many of the lessons the HPC world has learned over the last 5 years will make the adoption of Big Data easier and more effective. 

I’ll be watching to see how LTFS might be a good answer to Big Data portability.  We are seeing LTFS gain traction in some verticals like Media and Entertainment already.  The question of how to move Petabytes of data, either to seed a cloud provider or just move to a different location has always been a problem.  LTFS might just provide a good answer.

Dealing with massive data sets, be it integrity checking the data or protecting it is a struggle we all face at one time or another.  We are starting to see a new crop of software vendors, some in the Active Archive Alliance, that are creating data storage environments. 

Finally, with the expected shipment of LTO6 this calendar year, we will see a doubling of native capacity on media.  There should be performance improvements as well.  Since the LTO consortium is attending Tape Summit, hopefully we will get more details on it, and how it might affect the economy of storing big data.

As March rolls on, we should start to see a lot of information coming out of events such as the HPC Symposium and the Tape Summit on not only how to analyze Big Data, but how to manage and store it when it isn’t being crunch. 

By Steve Mackey, VP Sales, Europe and Africa

From the stage of world history right down to our everyday lives, everyone loves a good ‘what-if…?’. Whether it’s imagining how different the world might be if a famous political figure had chosen a different career, a sporting icon had signed for a different team, or even imagining  how different your circumstances might be if you had just taken up a different job offer a few years ago or attended a different college.

So here’s my attempt at a little bit of revisionist history, aimed at some nay-sayers who fixate on tape’s future: What if….tape WAS dead?

First of all I think you need to really work out what tape is really used for in current storage strategies. The shift from tape as a backup medium to an archive medium changes the game here – IT departments that used tape for backup and now use disk might not take the death of tape so badly, but those with archiving needs? That might be a different story altogether.

If you are an organisation that creates a lot of data and needs to retain it medium-to-long term for compliance or for revenue-generating activities then the death of tape will hit you hard – primarily in the wallet but also in other ways.

Just think - if tape WAS dead then the first thing you would have to do is scope out enough disk to match your archiving needs.  In terms of straight up acquisition costs per GB we all know that tape is significantly cheaper, but what if your CFO takes a longer term TCO view and asks how the figures stack up over the next decade or even twenty years? Are you really going to show your CFO this report from the Clipper Group, which puts the TCO of Disk over a twelve-year period somewhere around 15 times higher than tape?

Then let’s imagine that this hasn’t been enough to put you off – next up comes the chat with the facilities manager who might be in for a nasty shock when his electricity bill comes in. Those tape drives that would have otherwise sat there silently minding their own business without troubling the power supply will need to be replaced with lots of hyperactive disks that simply can’t bear to sit still. How do you justify those power costs when the disks are being constantly powered but accessed irregularly? Those disks, according to that same report that so shocked your CFO, are going to potentially consume up to 238 times as much power. That’s not good news when companies are looking to cut overhead and power costs are rising.

The financial implications of replacing tape with disk don’t bear thinking about, but there are also practical reasons why disk simply isn’t a good fit. From a disaster recovery perspective tape has always been a popular medium, simply because the media itself is so portable. If you have a primary archive you may decide that your data needs safeguarding against some kind of catastrophe. Getting tapes offline, offsite and into some kind of secure storage is relatively straightforward.

With disk? Not so simple. The only alternative approach, remembering that tape isn’t an option, might be to use an online backup / archiving service. A couple of draw-backs here – first, certainly for large enterprises, these solutions are still considered a relatively unproven solution, not just from a reliability perspective, but also in terms of the potential regulatory implications of putting sensitive data ‘out in the cloud’.  Secondly, because of the imperative on these services to keep costs to a minimum, many of them currently use tape as a storage target for customers, but of course in this brave new tape-free world they can’t! So with these services re-architected around disk, providers would undoubtedly have to hike their prices massively, making it an even less attractive proposition.

It’s worth remembering the proponents of this myth about tape’s demise are disk-vendors and it’s funny that they happen to be the only ones who profit in this dystopian IT vision, gaining an unhealthy share of their customers’ wallets. (It’s also interesting to note that most of them use tape themselves in their own IT departments!)  That said, IT departments are already struggling to manage data growth cost-effectively, and as we move into the era of Big Data, tape becomes an even more indispensible storage medium. For end-user organisations already struggling to focus IT expenditures on innovation over simply ‘keeping the lights on’ the situation would look very bleak without tape.

A big ‘thank you’ to all of you who attended our webinar entitled “Trends in Tape: Looking beyond LTO-5 with LTO-6 and LTFS.”  We had the best attendance ever. This is clearly a topic of great interest to many of you out there.  Bob Cone hosted the call and the discussion was packed with a multitude of great information including LTO-6 and the overall LTO Roadmap.  But more importantly, Bob covered the implications of the roadmap and LTFS and how they fit into the overall storage picture. With so many technologies now available, storage hierarchies and designing and choosing the right building blocks for your environment continues to get more complex.  The presentation distilled much of the vast amount of available information on numerous storage alternatives into an easy-to-understand discussion. Tape, Disk and Solid State Disk / Flash were covered including where they fit now, and where they will fit in the future.  The session was recorded and is available at the link below:

Looking beyond LTO-5 with LTO-6 and LTFS

The webinar underscores how LTO-6 fits into the LTO Roadmap and its important performance and capacity improvements over past generations. It also points out the advantages of LTO-6, which is why you may be interested in Spectra’s LTO-6 Pre-Purchase program. 

How many times have you thought about buying a new car, computer, TV, or cell phone but when you found out a new technology was just around the corner, you waited?  Personally, I need to upgrade my iPhone and considered the current 4S, but am waiting for the iPhone 5. Like me, you hold off and limp along with the old technology, anxiously awaiting the new technology.  Well, when it comes to LTO technology, you don’t have to wait.  Spectra is offering our customers a cost-efficient path to get the latest LTO-5 tape drive technology available today, along with an LTO-6 option, where they will receive an LTO-6 drive to replace the -5, as soon as the LTO-6 is available. 

In addition, this is a great opportunity for customers currently on LTO-3 drives:  LTO-6 drives have read/write compatibility with one generation back (LTO-5) and read only with two generations back (LTO-4).  So, if you have LTO-3 drives and media and want to move to a new generation, you could upgrade to the LTO-6 Pre-Purchase option now, get LTO-5 drives now and replace ALL the LTO-3s, read and re-write the data to LTO-5 media.   Then, when LTO-6s are available through the pre-purchase program (with no additional cost), swap out the LTO-5 drives, and be able to read/write with the LTO-5 media.  Otherwise, if you wait and go straight to the LTO-6 drives, you will need some other way to migrate your LTO-3 media, as it will be unreadable with the LTO-6 drives.

Everything is handled at the time of ordering the LTO-5 drives, so when the LTO-6 is available, we would contact you and find out when you would like us to ship the new drives.  Then you just send the LTO-5 drives back.  And all this is done with no additional paperwork.  The new LTO-6 tape drive will double capacity and provide a 50% increase in performance over LTO-5.  With a larger compression history buffer, the expected compression ratio will go from 2:1 to 2.5:1, so LTO-6 will offer a compressed capacity of 8 TB and data transfer rates of up to 525 MB/second.  The sixth generation of LTO tape drives provides many positive implications for IT and business managers and we are excited to offer you our LTO-6 pre-purchase program: LTO-5 today and the ability to be one of the very first to get LTO-6 and all its advantages when it becomes generally available.
 

As we say goodbye to another exciting year in the storage industry, we begin to set our sights on the future and what lies ahead.  While demand for data storage technologies continues to be strong and preparing for managing and effectively utilizing Big Data prevails in many organizations’ new initiative investigation; several technology drivers will directly and immediately impact the storage industry as we head into the New Year. Here’s a look at my predictions for 2012:

Tape is Here to Stay

Tape will continue its resurgence, driven in part by the increasing adoption of tape to offload spinning disk storage. Tape will be used as primary storage file storage for long-term data retention and will remain the most cost-effective enterprise storage media for Big Data and Cloud Storage environments.

Explosive Data Growth Continues

Data growth will continue unabated and more organizations will approach Petabyte capacities and seek new ways to manage, index and access their vast data volumes utilizing active archives.  In fact, the amount of data we manage today will seem insignificant five years from now.

More Cloud Storage Adoption

Cloud storage will increase in adoption with a heightened emphasis on data accessibility and security.

Big Data is Big Driver

Big Data will drive the movement toward massive library repositories that meet both capacity and economic requirements of massive data volumes and large data files. Much of the focus in 2011 on Big Data has been on analytics and how to derive value from this mass of data.  In 2012, we will start to hear more about how to retain and store this data.

Purpose-built SSD Systems Gain Steam

SSD will make further storage inroads and begin taking market share, albeit small, from enterprise disk. Purpose-built SSD systems will gain traction and compete with traditional disk systems that have added SSDs into existing designs.

Hardware-based Data Integrity Verification Required

Hardware-based data integrity verification will become a requirement for ‘best practice’ archive storage.

Spotlight on RAID Rebuild Times

Rebuild times for traditional RAID implementations will become a larger issue as drive capacities continue to grow and organizations keep adding spindles to their environments.

Shift in Traditional Backup Practices

Traditional backup practices will continue to shift.  Data centers will increasingly move to online, file-based archives for long-term data retention instead of utilizing offline backups in proprietary formats.