Spectra Logic has made a big change

Spectra Logic, the reference in secondary storage, has shaken its organization and started a market effort around solution marketing to promote solutions instead of corporate and independent product ones. In Spectra's terms, a solution groups software + hardware + services. It is a big change for the company and some employees had to leave even after a few decades of collaboration. We talked about that during the recent visit the IT Press Tour did at the company HQ in Boulder, Colorado.

The team pitched its software and hardware-based solutions like the Spectra Digital Archive that couples StorCycle and some storage units such as BlackPearl or tape libraries. On the hardware side, David Feller, VP of Product Management, used the term platforms to describe BlackPearl and tape libraries families.

As the strategy is clearly to promote all the spectrum of on-prem secondary storage, the idea is to align Spectra's archiving product line with AWS with S3 Standard/IA, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. The case study related to a university illustrates perfectly this approach coupling StorCycle with BlackPearl S3. A few other examples confirms this with also partners software. So globally a solution approach could be full Spectra but also based on partners' software like Rubrik, Cohesity, Veeam or Commvault.

Vail software is different as it offers a multi-site multi-cloud approach exposing a global namespace geographically available.

Spectra also has initiated a new project with its proposal for a new Open Standard Versioned Object Format, fully S3 compatible leveraging LTFS with some special attributes such as compression, encryption, hashing and tape set priority.