Spectra Logic was pleased to welcome 60 children to this year's 'Bring Your Child to Work Day' event. The day's highlights included a tour of Spectra Logic's manufacturing facility, a trade show to learn about all of the different departments within the company, shadow time, an engineering seminar, fire safety information and child ID kits.

Here's what some of the children had to say about their experience:

Allison Beasley
Grade 4, Peak to Peak Charter School

My name is Allison Beasley, I am 9 years old and I went to Bring Your Child to Work Day at Spectra Logic. I will tell you this much—it was loads of fun!!!

First off, Spectra started with a tour. I enjoyed that we toured both buildings, but I would recommend that they describe what the area is and what it does a little louder. I was in the back and couldn't hear very well. Later, I think you need time to calm down from all of the excitement.

If you think that too, then Shadow Time is your activity because you can spend time with your mom and dad, see their office, and do interviews with Spectra workers who showed they could speak with you by having awesome balloons up. Did I forget the fun tradeshow later on? Kids have to love it—you learn a lot so you'll be smart, you get lots of gifts of toys and candy at the tradeshow, and you get to see how everything works at Spectra Logic. What's a kid not to love?
Finally, we ended with cotton candy and ice cream! Now that is a good way to end your day. Can you easily see now why I love Bring your Kid to Work Day at Spectra Logic so much? Go Spectra Logic!!

Cole Beasley
Grade 6, Peak to Peak Charter School

I love Bring Your Child to Work Day! This was my second year going and it was just as fun as last year. My favorite part was seeing the engineers use a program called Solid Works and helping at the marketing trade show booth and solving their fun puzzle ball.

I like seeing what I might be doing in the future. I had fun learning about all the different people needed just to successfully make and sell one type of product. I am looking forward to next year and am hoping to see the engineers use Solid Works again and maybe a manufacturing lesson. Bring your Kid to Work Day is something I look forward to and hope to continue doing. Thanks Spectra!

Sasha M. Miller
Grade 4, Red Hawk Elementary

Sasha put together a power point presentation about her experience at Bring Your Child to Work Day and what she learned about Spectra Logic. She learned that the smallest machine is the T50e and the biggest is the T-Finity. According to Sasha, "The best time that I had was the crane, meeting new friends and of course learning!"

The employees at Spectra Logic had so much fun educating and entertaining the children. We look forward to many more to come.

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:

I got to thinking about this after an hour-long call with a customer that I only expected to take 5 minutes. He is quickly approaching 100 PB of data and does not have a plan for it. He has multiple disk and tape storage systems, with four different software solutions that manage portions of the data. I don't think the company ever expected to grow to this size when it made its software and hardware decisions over the last 10 years. They are now facing several major challenges:

• Knowledge.
• They have too many types of hardware and software for their staff to remain competent with all of them.
• Support.
• With a number of different systems, the amount of support contracts is difficult to manage, let alone deciphering the complexities of keeping everything running.
• Power.
• Power and cooling are crushing them. The monthly bill is affecting the finances of the company and they are struggling to be able to obtain more power to grow.
• Data.
• In the end, this should all be about the data, but with the data spread across so many systems and technologies, it is difficult to access and use, at best.

This company is not alone in their challenges. And it has happened to far too many organizations out there. Data islands and different storage systems all made sense when they were deployed and IT looked at them as single, standalone solutions. Several years and a lot of growth later, and many companies that didn't consider themselves a 'data company' now find themselves with Big Data. The challenge now is to figure out how to get out of the unplanned mess they are in and get things straightened out.

This is a challenge that users, integrators and manufactures should be working on for the next few years. As we talk about how to solve these problems, I think the first step is to focus on the data. The data is the reason we have all this storage and computing resources. There are a number of things being done to solve these challenges. I'll be sharing more about this in future posts.

I attended the EMC World show earlier this month and even though “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas,” I’d like to share a few things about this year’s event.

Early last year, Spectra Logic and EMC entered into an agreement for EMC to resell our complete T-Series tape library line for LTO tape backup and archive applications, bundled with its own storage hardware and software suite.

Since that time, EMC has sold Spectra tape storage solutions to more than 150 different customers in 20 countries across the globe, with heavy concentrations in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. Thirty percent of EMC/Spectra sales were to enterprise accounts with data demands for Petascale-capacity tape storage solutions.

Given these milestones, it was great to be at the show this year with our customers and partners talking about our joint solutions. We experienced great booth traffic, due in part to our awesome giveaways, but also because people were genuinely interested in learning more about how tape could solve their storage challenges. And, based on the companies that visited and the titles of the executives, they were the right people.

There was a bit of an interesting dichotomy at the show. Attendees were either in agreement that tape was still a critical part of the storage infrastructure, or the polar opposite – there were companies that were off of tape completely. I'd say the split on this was 60/35 respectively.  The other 5% were folks that had tried to go tapeless 3-4 years ago but that were now coming back to tape.

The conference portion covered a large variety of topics related to data storage including backup and recovery, archiving, big data and cloud. As well as an entire session focused on the trends, challenges and options for managing storage.

No event in Las Vegas would be complete without some great entertainment. EMC World featured a special private performance by Bruno Mars as well as a variety of superheroes running around the exhibit floor to “save the day!”

Overall, EMC World was a good forum for showcasing our solutions and demonstrating the value we provide in helping organizations easily procure best-of-breed technology to cost-effectively store, manage and back up vast amounts of data.

On Saturday, May 4^th, the Kohl Elementary 5K Run/Fun Walk was more than just a local, philanthropic race for Boulder-based Spectra Logic. In addition to helping support a great cause - Kohl Elementary – the race also honored the memory of Terence Doherty, a Spectra Logic employee who passed away last year in a tragic biking accident in Boulder. 

The race started with a special tribute at the start line and all event t-shirts honored him with his personal motto “el latido del viento” or “pulse of the wind” on the sleeve. It was a beautiful way to honor and remember Terence and meant a lot to all of us at Spectra.

2013 marks the third year that Spectra Logic has participated in Kohl’s 5K Run/Fun Walk as Education Champion donating money, resources and volunteers. This year’s 5K race helped raise more than $3,700 with 100 percent of event proceeds going to help purchase new playground equipment.

To learn more about the event or make a monetary or in-kind donation, please visit www.kohlelementary5k.com.

We were excited to announce last month that the University of Bristol selected our tape library to accommodate up to 2PB of capacity for its data storage needs.

The University consists of a heavily virtualized environment, providing over 450 servers to back-up in central services and it needed to create an archive and migrate less time-critical data to a tape library in order to free up costly primary storage.

After considering its options, the University did a trial-run for a few months with our T200 tape library and then selected our T680 tape library due to its larger capacity, with 42 rack units providing up 2PB of compressed storage with the LTO-5 tape drive and media technology deployed in the library. They also used StorHouse software from FileTek to move the data from primary disk storage to the active tape archive so that the data held on the library is always readily available.

The T-680 includes the advanced security technology that initially attracted the University to Spectra's solutions, namely integrated BlueScale Encryption to provide added AES-256 bit security for stored data and Media Lifecycle Management. Media Lifecycle Management records over 40 data points every time a tape is loaded, giving vital statistical and diagnostic information so that integrity of the data on the tapes can be ensured and easily managed.

Post installation, the University of Bristol is migrating data into its active archive to help offload the primary storage and to more efficiently manage backups. In addition, the extra capacity afforded by our tape libraries will enable the University to scale to multiple petabytes in the same footprint in the future.

Today's universities are facing their own data growth challenges as more information is being created daily by faculty, students and staff in the form of research, communications and academic projects. The University of Bristol is the most recent example of how Spectra is able to more cost-effectively accommodate the needs of higher education institutions using our tape libraries and an active archive approach.

If you'd like to learn more about our tape libraries or active archives, please contact me at stevem@spectralogic.com.

One of the most daunting tasks facing the HPC industry today is how to manage the onslaught of exponential data growth rates. As users create, gather and move various data assets though their life-cycle, multiple applications are used to access, process, manipulate and output the data.

It is critical that the storage infrastructure is configured and tiered appropriately to enable an efficient workflow that allows timely and cost-effective access to data. New tape technologies combined with disk, and eventually flash, can address the current and future challenges and objectives of the HPC storage administrators, including performance, compliance, security, cost, energy consumption, asset preservation and data protection.

The introduction of a Linear Tape File System (LTFS) has paved the way for tape network-attached storage (NAS), because it provides the ability to access files on LTO tape in the same way if they were on disk. Let's take a look at some of the reasons to implement tape NAS.

On average, the cost differential between disk and tape is holding steady at around 10 to 1. For many applications this is acceptable. This differential would apply to the data that should reside on Tier 1 storage because of its critical nature or high speed accessibility requirement. The value and access to the data is equivalent with the cost to store and manage it. I find that this data typically represents about 20% of most customers' data volume.

However, one must consider the entire cost of Tier 1 storage including the capital expenditure to acquire it, along with the operational cost to support power and cool it, and the space to house it. Best practice is to make multiple copies of Tier 1 data regularly and incrementally as it changes and manage it through intelligent, policy-based file system applications.

As we move down the pyramid of storage, we come to what I call Tier 2 of storage. This is where tape is gaining momentum and encroaching on what used to be primarily disk territory. With today's tape technology attributes, more and more data managers are finding tape to be the answer and solution to their biggest challenges regarding the storage tsunami. Tape has a long media life, higher reliability than disk, and a significantly lower cost. This has made it optimal for offline storage and data protection and archive.

Historically, tape has dominated in this role and has been the technology of choice. In recent years, however, because of the continued innovation of tape from various vendors, it is now being positioned as a Tier 2 NAS. These innovations include:

• The ability of tape to outperform disk when architected properly.
• The ability of tapes to be written to and read from through a native files system in file format transparent to the end user, aka NAS/LTFS.
• The greener impact of tape storage and increasing power and space costs.
• Total cost of ownership improves storage economics.
• The significant capacity increases in tape, which makes the cost per GB or TB 10x less than disk.
• The reliability and lower bit error rate (BER) of tape over disk.

Aside from the 10x lower cost of tape and the increasing importance of its lower bit error rate, tape also has a useful life of at least twice as long as disk drives.

LTFS has become a game changer in the world of storage and will allow users to leverage the full capability of today s tape. The LTFS specification was created by IBM and is available as an open standard for standalone tape drives using LTO.

Basically, LTFS allows tape to be used in a fashion like disk or other removable media making tape the most cost-effective archival data storage solution for most applications. Continued development and innovation in tape indicates that this trend will continue well into the future.

I'll be exploring this topic in more detail at the SGI User Conference in San Diego on May 2nd. If you are in the area, come check it out!

I just got back from sunny Orlando and no, I wasn't at Disney World with all of the spring break visitors, but the SNW 2013 show was the next "happiest place on earth" for those in the storage industry.

The theme of this year's show was "Intelligent Architecture for the Data Driven Business," and there were some great end users in attendance and lots of sizeable companies with even more sizable storage needs. I saw folks from Sweden, Australia, California, Texas, and Florida (of course).

SNW was the perfect venue for updating these companies on the many storage options available and the latest technologies and trends in data storage. There was a good flow of attendee traffic and interest in learning about storage products and the differences between vendor offerings.

The education track was excellent. I spent a majority of the three days attending the sessions, most of which were full or close to full throughout the day. From these sessions and conversations with attendees, a few topics and trends emerged including:

• Cloud Interface Technologies. Evolving cloud interface technologies that allow movement of data between clouds.
• SSD Hybrid Systems. SSD market is needing a few SSD-only appliances, and the true differentiation and larger demand for SSD-storage is in hybrid systems.
• Data Growth. How to architect to deal with rapid unstructured data growth.

Curtis Preston of Truth in IT was at the show and provided a little comic relief with his parody videos about the storage industry. If you have a chance, check them out. Here’s one of my favorites: "Rescue me from Pain (A parody)."

Did you attend SNW this year? If so, what were your impressions of the show?

I am heading to Las Vegas for the NAB Show. I don't go every year, but do enjoy going, as it is far more diverse than many shows and conferences we all go to. I am not a professional, but rather a poor excuse for an amateur when it comes to digital images and video, but it is always fun to see what the pros use.

I am hoping to get a few minutes to check out some of the new POV camera and maybe some lenses for the Nikon. With a lot of the vendor floor focused on content creation and manipulation, data storage issues are not going to ease up any time soon.

I have been looking through some of the announcements and email blasts from vendors going to NAB, whether just in a booth or presenting in a session. While not as flashy a topic as some of the others, there is going to be a noticeable amount of conversation about Big Data. The topics seem to break into two primary categories, analytics and data storage.

With multiple ways people consume content today combined with numerous social network channels, the opportunity to learn about consumer preferences is high. I think the number of questions that can be analyzed are endless. Things like "Can key influencers in niche markets be identified to help promote targeted productions?" or "What are the most effective cross promotion programs?" can benefit from big data analytics.

On the storage side of big data, Media and Entertainment is one of the industries at the forefront of the unstructured data explosion. I can get a GoPro camera that shoots in 4K now so I might be experiencing a small version of these challenges. More beyond high definition content is being generated, then throw 3D into the mix and traditional storage methods are being stretched.

We should see some new storage products running next generation file systems, more advanced data management continued expansion of data tape storage and some conversations about object based storage. Organizations are approaching file counts that exceed traditional management.

I hope I see some interesting things that I can talk about when I get back.

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.