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Corporate Milestones

In 1979 at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Nathan Thompson gathered his last $500 to start buying and reselling used computer equipment from his dorm room. An electrical engineering and computer science student, his investment established Western Automation and laid the foundation for his future growth and success in the IT industry. In an ever changing industry, we have evolved from market to market to meet the evolving needs of our customers.

The company's focus in 1984 was providing memory boards with disk interfaces. In 1988, Western Automation acquired and became Spectra Logic Corporation, a data storage company that has installed tens of thousands of products to customers in over 72 countries. Today we specialize in innovative backup archive solutions through tape and disk-based products. Our history of proven software and hardware engineering expertise has led the company to produce many industry first contributions.

Read on to find out how Spectra Logic has evolved from a memory board supplier to the data protection manufacturer it is today.

1992 Business focus changes to backup software and tape storage
1995 Spectra Logic adds tape libraries to supplement its software product line
1997 First to automate Sony AIT tape technology in a library
1999 First to offer embedded Fibre Channel libraries
2000 First to offer integrated partitioning with Shared Library Services
2001 Spectra Logic design exceeds 100 tape slots per square foot
2002 Spectra Logic and its partners accomplish terabyte-an-hour backup and restore
2002 First to offer customer replaceable robotics
2003 First to offer all-native iSCSI tape libraries
2003 Spectra Logic introduces TeraPacks or storage “chambers” for grouped media management
2005 First to market with hardware-based Encryption. Spectra Logic introduces the first tape library that integrates with disk in one frame — the Spectra T950 with RXT
2006 First to offer hardware-based, VTL encryption with compression (RXT)
2007 First to offer archive and backup servers (nTier)
2008

Media Lifecycle Management is released as the first in-library media management tool that significantly reduces errors caused by tape media. Spectra also completes the release ofthe entire T-Series Mid-Range line (T200, T380, T680), giving customers a seamless upgrade path with the unique TranScale™ architecture.
2009 Spectra celebrates its 30th anniversary with the announcement of T-Finity, the market's largest, most scalable and high performing library. With industry leading intelligence and a fault-tolerant architecture, T-Finity meets the needs of the most demanding, data-intensive storage environments.
2010 Spectra's tape library product line swept Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com's 2010 Quality Awards for enterprise and midrange tape libraries, winning first place in all 14 categories. Spectra earned the highest scores for any tape library in all five years of this awards program, and the highest technical support scores recorded to date for tape libraries in both the midrange and enterprise categories.
Today Spectra Logic is the data storage innovator that helps you save time, lower costs, and reduce risks.