It’s that time of the year again. Federal IT administrators are sorting through fall-out funds, small business set asides and overall budgets in a mad race to refresh their data centers with new equipment—all by September 30. Here are a few tips to consider as your year end approaches.
1. Stock up. With extra budget in arms length, it’s a great time to replenish your supply of tapes and drives. It’s a great idea to be prepared in the case of a drive failure or media corruption. Spectra Logic Federal reserves tapes and drives during this time specifically to meet federal buying season needs.
2. Get faster and store more with LTO-5. LTO-5 drives and media are available, and we’ve seen high adoption rates and easy, smooth integration in the field. LTO-3 users can now enjoy a 3.75x increase in tape capacity and a 1.75x increase in throughput on LTO-5; and LTO-4 customers can almost double their tape capacity while enjoying blazing transfer rates up to 1TB/hour compressed to/from tape, all by migrating to LTO-5.
3. Revisit your disaster recovery plan. At the end of a calendar year, we set a New Year’s Resolution. In that spirit, the end of Federal buying season is a good time to revisit, test and revise your DR plan. Planning and preparation is the best advocate to support your continuity of operations (COOP) initiatives.
4. Add Spectra to your wish list. Spectra Logic is classified as a small business, and twenty percent of our overall corporate revenue is generated by Federal customers in more than 200 agencies. Our backup and archive products are manufactured in the USA. We have been listed in the top 10 percent of revenue generators on GSA contract #GS-35F-0563K for three consecutive years, and were recently granted a 5-year contract extension (see our recent press release). In addition to GSA, Spectra Logic is also listed several other federal purchasing contracts, including SEWP, NetCents and ITES-2H, among others.
Spectra knows the challenges that Federal IT administrators face and is here to work with you to create the best backup and archiving plan to meet your agency’s unique needs.  Further questions? Contact me directly at markwe@spectralogic.com. 

Mark Weis

VP, Federal Sales

Beginning in FY10 (July 2009) Spectra began its foray into the Latin American market, which includes Mexico, Central America, and South America. Prior to this, Spectra had a few clients only in Mexico, most notably Mexico's major oil exploration and processing company.

In order to break into the Central and South America markets, we needed to find potential distributors and clients. In many case we leveraged relationships with our ECO partners like Comvault, Front Porch Digital, and Cray to recommend likely candidates. Currently Spectra has signed distribution partnerships in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico; we’re working on Chile and Columbia as well. These distribution partners not only sell, but also service, our products.

Brazil was our biggest “new territory” revenue generator in FY10. Our Brazil business is just getting started, but we’re expecting continued growth in FY11. In addition to Brazil, we’re working to develop distribution partners in the other countries to grow Spectra’s Latin America market presence.

Stay tuned for a quarterly update from me on our Latin American initiatives here on the Spectra Backup and Recover blog. Visit us August 25-27 in San Paulo, Brazil at the SET 2010 Broadcast & Cable show; and September 25^th in San Pablo, Brazil at the IDC Brazil Dynamic Infrastructure, Storage & Virtualization Seminar 2010.

-Ray Heineman, VP of International Sales, Americas and Eastern Asia

I recently had the honour of getting on stage at the Storage Awards 2010 to collect the gong for Green Storage Product of the Year, awarded to the T-Finity. The award win wasn’t the first for Spectra Logic over the last few months, but I’m not here to crow about our success (well, maybe just a little).

Instead, the award made me think about the whole Green IT movement and where we currently stand in the UK. The hype around Green IT has far outweighed the traction – in part because Green has been leapt upon by marketeers and the buzz-word brigade, but also because the ‘movement’ pretty much met the global economic troubles head-on as soon as it started to gain any momentum.

For vendors that started off down the Green IT messaging path there was a lot of backtracking as they focused their efforts on promoting cost-savings and TCO benefits in line with customers’ priorities. Now that economic recovery seems to be slowly creeping into view, there may be a lot of vendors coming full-circle, feeling that customers may be ready to move CSR up the IT agenda.

This posturing and positioning is what faces vendors trying to pass off any technology as IT’s answer to Captain Planet in a desperate attempt to gain a competitive edge. I’m referring to technologies such as vast disk-arrays that eat up moderately less power than a competing product while spinning away idly in the background. There is nothing Green about this – it is just a matter of being slightly less inefficient. Organisations mandated to be green will see through this spin, and instead hone in on genuinely Green technologies.

From Spectra Logic’s point of view, we like to think we can talk trees or £’s to customers – however you look at it we’ll save you both.  When we started designing the T-Finity did we set out to make the Greenest storage product on the market? No. But by creating the most efficient, scalable and dense tape library on the market we created an extremely green product by default.

So it is perhaps apt that commentators are referring to the green shoots of recovery – economic growth, after a period of such severe contraction, may well lead to a shot in the arm for Green IT. For our part, you won’t notice any difference in how we position our products – if you are a business that needs to Green your approach to IT – be it for legal or less self-serving reasons - then tape is the obvious choice for backup and archive.    

Our LTO-5 adoption, by new and existing T-Series library customers, is progressing very well indeed.  And that suggests to me that the core values of LTO, and tape in general, remain relevant to our customers, current and future.  But what type of value does a fifth generation of LTO deliver? 

How about consolidation, surely a well worn word within the business lexicon?  Never more so since we dipped into [what we hope will be] the last recession we see in a loooong while.   

But when you pare it back, it’s hardly surprising that consolidation should deliver simpler management and drive higher efficiency (“let’s do more with less” they tell us…).  Server virtualization, for example, delivered efficiencies from fewer servers and centralized resource management.  Customers liked that sort of thing.

In storage, data deduplication (dedupe) has become mainstream. Dedupe offers data reduction by identifying that multiple copies of the same data exist and then storing just one or two by deduplication (consolidating the jargon, as well as the data, was a missed opportunity).  Dedupe improves utilization of energy intensive disk and so increases efficiency.  Spectra’s flexible and multifunction nTier products do just that and more: efficient; easy to manage, and in the case of nTier – flexible.  Customers tend to like that sort of combination even more.

As Spectra’s LTO-5 adoption grows (in parallel with Spectra’s continued growth…more on that in another blog) I was unsurprised to hear that the LTO Consortium’s latest survey, conducted by Fleishman-Hillard, of mid- to larger sized companies found that “users of disk-only storage are planning to add tape to their solution”. In addition, “37% of managers in tape-only environments indicated more use of tape…an upward trend from 2006…”

For the existing tape customers here are just a couple of reasons why they’re planning to use more tape:

• LTO-3 users can enjoy a 3.75x increase in tape capacity and a 1.75x increase in throughput on LTO-5
• LTO-4 customers can almost double their tape capacity while enjoying blazing transfer rates up to 1TB/hour compressed to/from tape

For new and existing customers there’s even more consolidation available. 

• Spectra’s T-Series libraries deliver unrivalled data center floor space consolidation benefits using our patented TeraPack design.  
• LTO-5, and LTO-6, LTO-7 and LTO-8, will proactively help customers to even more consolidation benefits as they manage the data growth explosion. 

It’s not difficult to predict that much richer data repositories with increasing tape functionality (e.g. LTFS) and storage utility value (e.g. active archives) will become main stream as LTO-5 sales increase.

Consolidation, there’s a lot to be said for it...and I expect we’ll be hearing more of it…

Spectra just closed out our best fiscal year in the company’s history and launched into Fiscal Year 2011 in July! We owe this in large part to our channel partners, an ever growing set of storage integrators dedicated to the Spectra brand. And of course to the channel marketing team, a team that continues to impress with their dedication and creativity in working with our partners. Obviously I’m not afraid to brag, so here goes. In the past year the channel marketing team added well over a dozen new programs, we won a 5-Star Partner Program award from Everything Channel, and were recognized across the board in marketing and technical leadership awards.

Kicking off our new fiscal year is the time we reflect on everything we’ve done the past year and begin formalizing our plans for the next year. And it’s the time of year that we present this to our worldwide sales force. Here’s what we told them about the SpectraEDGE channel partner program… we added new incentive programs, a new partner ramping process, invested in more marketing events, and created a focus on some of our top players. This year we plan to expand the number of partners we invest in, update our online training program, and launch a competitive take-out program among many other things.

So what got the most interest in our presentation to the sales team? Our first ever Channel Champion award! This went to the sales rep that had the highest quality partner activity and revenue in his territory. The winner was our Chicago based sales rep, Tony Ameri. And upon receiving the bling - a big, gold, heavyweight belt - you can bet he held it above his head and pranced around the room daring everyone to try to win it from him next quarter. Maybe he didn’t prance, but he certainly strutted. 

Want to hear more? Follow Spectra Edge’s updates at www.Twitter.com/spectraedge and me at www.Twitter.com/betsydoughty.

George Crump posed an interesting question when he asked if primary storage deduplication will kill archive and backup.  It is a great question, and one we should explore.  If you don’t want to read my ramblings, my short answer is no. 

There is a lot more to archive and backup than simply storing a lot of data, something deduplication has proven it can do well.  Backed up and archived data needs to be cataloged, indexes and managed through its life or retention.  That’s one of the reasons we don’t use tar and dump commands much these days.  Snapshots can remove much of the recovery burden from alternate storage devices.  I have seen customers recover almost all single file restores from snapshots.  But they never served as a replacement for backups.   As George said, we sleep better at night when copies of our data are on different systems.  There are lots of reasons for that.  We all worry about a bad firmware load.  If you have all your data on one array (or replicated to an identical one) a bad firmware release could wipe you out.  And of course there are physical failures. No matter how well designed a system is, something external can happen.  In the years I was in the field, I heard some unbelievable external failure stories where an non-IT event started the failure.   (Maybe I should start collecting them).

This leads me to conclude that proper architecture of a data storage environment includes dissimilar storage devices.  Your backup and DR copies need to be independent from production data, to prevent a cascading failure getting every copy.  For archive, the first copy could be on the primary storage platform, but the redundant copies (and all good archive systems maintain a minimum of 2 copies of the data) need the same.  It could be as easy as Spectra nTier disk and Spectra T-Series tape, or it could be more complex.  What it won't be is a single disk array for primary storage, archive and data protection.

The high importance of data protection is top of mind these days – specifically in light of some high profile cases of data loss in the UK. News of some potentially impending legislation this side of the pond has again drawn attention to the issue of how companies look after customer data.

With LTO-5 drives released in our T-Series libraries it’s another trusted innovation milestone for us at Spectra. We keep our innovation conveyor cranking along here. As Spectra’s customers trust us to deliver valued tape innovation, millions trust LTO tape (> 3.3M drives sold, > 140M cartridges sold) with their data assets, now and for the long term. 

http://www.spectralogic.com/LTO-5

I am amazed at how easy it is for people to consume all of their available storage space—and how quickly we can do it.  Just looking at my own storage situation, it is remarkable how much “stuff” I have to store; a snow blower, coolers, lots of car parts, bike parts, camping gear and who knows what else.   My old storage shed was recently hit by a tree, so I had to replace it this month.  I purchased the biggest one allowed by city zoning regulations, and already…. I realize I should have gone bigger.