Spectra Logic’s ‘Deep Storage’ Vision

We’re attending Spectra Logic’s analyst conference in Boulder Colorado. While known for its extensive tape products, the company is thinking ahead – pointing out that no one really knows what storage products we’ll be using in 20 years time.

Nathan Thompson

Driven by its users rather than its technology, CEO Natham Thompson and team discussed the 6 attributes of its ‘deep storage’ strategy. In particular:

1. REST Interface – Spectra Logic announced today that it has added new commands to Amazon’s S3 to create a tape-friendly DS3 protocol; a University consortium customer with a super computer and over 100PB storage is adding a REST/HTTP interface over the top of this existing infrastructure to allow worldwide weather researchers to store data in the private Cloud free of charge
2. Persistent – data can be maintained forever, protected against ‘bit rot’ and copied to new media types in future when necessary – a petroleum exploration customer with over 70PD of stored seismic data is evaluating ‘deep storage’, with a requirement for non-degradable, periodically verified, incorporating meta data and the ability to move it to new media when necessary
3. Cost Effective – It claims tape costs between 1/5^th to 1/50^th the price of traditional disk storage; it has an online digital photograph company with more than 120PB of customer photos which it has to keep perpetually; deep storage has the potential to help with its exponential growth in storage costs and the linearly linked costs of storage management software
4. Efficient – the lower electricity costs of tape libraries in comparison with spinning disk is an important attribute of the vision; it has a cable TV customer with a 50k analogue tape cartridge library; in digitising to tape it stands to use an order of magnitude less power than if it moved it to high capacity disk drives
5. Secure – it sees a need for high capacity security in a number of industry sectors including 2 of its health care customers (both with more than 30PB of patient records), which it can provide through encryption at the end point storage, in the HTTPs connection between client and storage server, inside server and in media itself; it is clear that genomic research will require ultimate security, as well as persistent retention
6. Easy to integrate and deploy – working with block storage is complicated today, especially for younger generation engineers graduating without the appropriate training; it estimates that one government customer with over 300PB of satellite images can use DS3 to implement digitisation in a couple months in comparison with the couple of years it would take with traditional block storage techniques

It’s very refreshing to find a storage company not putting everything it does into the Big Data bucket. Spectra Logic is using its vision to accommodate the use of tape storage in modern applications – something almost entirely missing from the industry up to now. While tape itself is something many enterprise customers have been trying to get away from, there are a number of industry sectors where big organisations find it increasingly necessary – such as broadcast, media and entertainment, life science and oil and gas exploration. DS3 will no doubt help to get tape used for the first time in public Clouds and others developing Internet applications. Reducing the cost, while making the data reliable and secure are good attributes for a strong strategy.
Much of the information at this conference has been supplied under a non-disclosure agreement – but not the vision. We hope to write more once the restrictions have been removed. Please let us know if you think the addition of REST APIs will encourage the use of tape in Internet applications.