This past December, we were honored to receive one of the storage industry's most notable awards - Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Quality Awards - as voted on by customers and qualified Storage magazine readers. Spectra Logic received top honors in both the enterprise and midrange tape library categories, and this is the sixth time we’ve won first place in a Quality Awards category.

The Storage magazine recognition was gratifying and capped a year of significant success and technological achievements for us. Over the past year, we announced the availability of 10GbE iSCSI connectivity to tape, the commencement of LTO-6 shipments and the installation of a 380 PBs nearline tape archive for NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputing system—one of the largest and most powerful supercomputers in the world. This year is off to a great start as well. Spectra Logic has installed more than a half an Exabyte of tape storage capacity in the first half of FY2013 and we have posted nine percent year-over-year growth.

Results for the Quality Awards are derived from a survey of qualified Storage magazine readers who assess products in five main categories: sales-force competence, initial product quality, product features, product reliability and technical support. 

With the Quality Awards win, we outpaced competing midrange and enterprise tape library solutions from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Quantum and Dell. End-user respondents gave us particularly high marks for initial product quality, product reliability, and our knowledgeable sales force representatives and technical support personnel. We take pride in providing an unsurpassed customer experience and would like to thank our valued customers for participating in this annual survey. This win would not have been possible without their participation, and we will continue to focus on delivering innovative, high quality data storage solutions that meet and exceed their expectations.

Backup and recovery guru - Curtis Preston recently announced a new seminar series, Backup Central Live by Truth in IT, for 2011.  When Spectra heard of the new events we signed up for the first 5 announced in early 2011 – how could we resist?!?! We were quite excited to participate in these day- long events taking place in various cities (Irvine, CA Jan 25; Santa Clara, CA Jan 27; Orlando, FL Feb 1; Chicago, IL Feb 3 – now Feb 22; Houston, TX Feb 8) – where we’d get the opportunity to speak one-on-one with end users as well as share some of our personal accomplishments and industry updates during a speech to the entire audience.
 

A bit more on the seminars - Curtis plans to extend these day long seminars to upward of 20 cities this year. Qualified end users can register for free admission on the www.backupcentrallive.com  Web site. Each of the seminars consists of independent industry insight from Curtis, as well as sponsor presentations, and a chance for end users to meet one on one with sponsors at their table top exhibits. The umbrella theme for each event is addressing the challenges of backup and recovery – and how products/services address them. Here’s a sample of topics being covered:

• Virtualized servers (e.g. VMware, Hyper-V, Xen)
• Very large servers and data centers
• Remote offices and laptops
• Data retained for multiple years
• Cloud Backup Services
• Deduplication
• Continuous data protection (CDP)
• Near-CDP
• Archive software
• Tape and its proper role

At each event, Spectra is presenting “The Right Role for Tape in Archive & Backup”, a quick summary of what Spectra Logic is up to and what the tape industry looks like moving forward. Folks that attend our sessions have the opportunity to learn about our recent Quality Awards win sweep in Storage magazine/ www.searchstorage.com; the future of tape –the LTO roadmap and how future tape technologies can hold up to 35TB uncompressed; the advent of the Active Archive Alliance, and how the University of MN implemented an active archive supporting 200TBs today with the capability of growing to 1PB within three years with a Spectra Logic T950 library. 
 

We are at the Houston event today, presenting at 2:20PM CST.

Please note the Chicago event was rebooked from early February to allow for extra snow shoveling time – and will now take place Feb 22nd. I hope those that registered will be able to dig themselves out in time to make it in time for the rescheduled event!

 If you’re interested in attending one of these events visit www.backupcentrallive.com to register –chances are Backup Central Live will be coming to a city near you. Oh yeah, don’t forget to keep an eye on the Spectra Logic event page – we’re all over the place and are participating in lots of events in 2011!

Follow me on Twitter at @katiemaryjones.

Come celebrate the start of 2011 with us at Spectra Logic.  To kick off the new calendar year, we are offering a Spectra T50e pricing special that is good for a limited time only.  The T50e offers entry-level and mid-market customers powerful library management functionality including  highly reliable tape backup and archive with complete Lifecycle Management, increased security through our integrated BlueScale Encryption, and a range of support options to complement their requirements.  In fact, thanks to our built-in BlueScale management software that ranges across our entire tape library family, the T50e offers all of Spectra’s rich features that competing libraries typically only offer to enterprise customers.

Starting Feb. 1 2011, Spectra is promoting the T50e with 10 slots and 1 LTO-4 half-height Fibre Channel tape drive for only $7,725.00. Or, if you want the latest in tape technology, we're offering the T50e with 10 slots and 1 LTO-5 half-height Fibre Channel tape drive for $9,275.00.

For more information on this limited, 2011 special offer, check out the Spectra Logic web site at Spectra Logic T50e and just click the button to start the New Year off right. 

By the way, our mid-range products recently swept the board in Storagemagazine/SearchStorage.com’s Quality Awards for Tape Libraries program.  See some highlights about the T50e tape library as reported by end users in the 2010 survey. The Spectra Logic T50e…. it easily stands out in front.

I think one of my favorite sayings I heard on more than one occasion and in various different words at SC10 this year was, “It is good to be Spectra!”  I heard this from customers, partners, VARs, analysts and other employees, and it is certainly true.  The tape war is on and by all accounts, Spectra is winning the war one battle at a time.  I heard so many times from so many people that we seem to be the dominant tape company in the market.  Tape is who we are.  It is what we do.  After 31 years of being in business, these truths are starting to manifest themselves in our continued success as a tape company.  The past few years, we have been experiencing much of our success and growth in the High Performance Computing industry not because of tape, but what we can do with tape.  Spectra has committed to continued research and development by investing millions into new features and functionality that are a direct result of our HPC customer requirements. We are therefore able to offer direct benefit and value to them.

SC10 continues to be one of Spectra’s best shows of the year.  This year’s event was no exception.  In addition to learning more about current trends in the HPC market in general, our Spectra executives and team were able to meet with hundreds of our HPC customers and potential customers.

As usual, Spectra was at SC10 in full force.  We had a very nice and large booth with a great location.  In the booth, we showcased a 5 frame T-Finity, T950, T380 and nTier system.  We also partnered with IBM HPSS and had a demo system of their software in the booth, which brought a lot of attention and interest.  Fortunately for us, the competition was nowhere to be found.  I was surprised that there were no other direct competitors at the event with any library systems in their booths.  IDC research shows that the high end HPC market grew by 65% in 2009 and is continuing on that path for many years to come.  Storage contributed to the largest percentage of that growth at almost 10% to just over 3 billion!  In addition to that, they cite that some of the major data center challenges are power, cooling, real estate and system management.  Storage and data management continue to grow in importance.  All these factors and challenges are continuing to increase data centers’ usage of tape, not just for backup, but for near line data archiving.  Through Spectra’s innovations, continued product development and commitment to customer service and support, we will continue to gain market share from the competition and continue to validate ourselves as the market leader.

In the spirit of continuing to be the leader in tape storage, Spectra has a roadmap a mile wide and 2 miles deep.  We continue to innovate, create and incorporate significant enhancements into our products in order to give our customers bigger, better and faster systems that meet their growing demands for performance and scalability.  Much of our continued focus on development is enhancing our T-Finity platform.  By quarter two of next year, we will incorporate the IBM Enterprise TS1130 drive in the T-Finity.  Many of our HPC customers have been anxiously awaiting this feature and we anticipate that the ability to include both LTO and Jaguar drives in our system will be a significant competitive advantage.  In addition to this, we are continuing development of our “fly-over” feature that will interconnect multiple 25 frame T-Finity systems’ allowing scalability that surpasses all other systems on the market today by a long shot!

Our marketing efforts this year were second to none.  We really pushed the active archive message and there was certainly a lot of buzz at the show about it. 

There were analyst meetings with the usual suspects such as IDC and Intersect 360.  They always want to spend time with us to find out what we are up to and it is always good to spend time with them to find out what the market is up to based on their research and findings.  Leigh Grainger always does an outstanding job arranging these important meetings and interviews.

Molly Rector’s speech on “Tape Takes on Mass Storage” had about 120 people in attendance, which was very obvious when our booth began buzzing with activity following her presentation. 

In Summary

The HPC industry is continuing to grow and data storage is the fastest growth component.  We have customers that are already planning on having an Exabyte of data by 2017.  This means that they will continue to double their data storage each year along with other HPC customers.  This explosive and exponential growth is going to demand a large-scale system that can accommodate and manage more data every year in a secure, energy efficient, reliable and space conservative manner.   Spectra understands the growing pains of storage and we are keenly aware of the associated challenges.  This is why we continue to develop products that address the challenges and meet the demanding requirements for data storage.

SC10 in New Orleans:

Best show ever!

Best booth ever!

Best team ever!

Most opportunities ever!

This will, once again, be our best year ever!