Spectra Logic heats up sales with ArcticBlue

The press always goes for the flashiest of all solutions, but in the data-storage game, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“If you think about flash (solid state drives for storage), it is mostly used for performance solutions, as it costs as much as $3 or $4 per gigabyte of storage — our product is as little as 10 cents a gigabyte,” said Nathan Thompson, founder and CEO of Boulder’s Spectra Logic Corp. “We are often secondary and tertiary solutions, but we’re where all the data ends up going.”

So while data centers serving functions such as Internet transactions go for speed over cost, Thompson said most data-storage needs are not quite as in as big a hurry, and the latter account for about 80 percent of the market. Serving that market niche has been the focus of Spectra Logic (founded in 1984) for last 24 years, primarily with an eye toward creating cost-efficient and accurate tape-storage solutions.

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But that’s not to say that Spectra Logic doesn’t stay on the edge of the technology curve, as evidenced by its new ArcticBlue solution, introduced in October.  Essentially, ArcticBlue creates a cloud-like interface for local, or on-premise storage, which allows access to a mix of storage media, including most tape and hard-drive solutions.

ArcticBlue actually employs flash drives to quickly cache and index data and can store on both disc and tape solutions. Essentially, it creates an S3 interface — the Simple Storage Service common to many cloud solutions — in advance of the cache, allowing tape solutions to be accessed at the speed of magnetic discs.

“We can go to tape, or we can go to an SMR disc drive, or we can go to both,” Thompson said. SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) discs are new technology allowing for increased density writing to disc drives.

ArcticBlue by itself can access data stored deeply in tape, but uses the SMR drives for more readily accessed data. Together with the company’s BlackPearl solution, it can access almost all deeply stored data in hard drives and tape formats.

Thompson noted that the bulk of Spectra Logic’s solutions are based on Web protocols, allowing for easier integration and adoption by companies that already have their own data storage. Universities, research centers and other large organizations are among the company’s clients.

“We have a lot of interest because it’s pretty easy to use, especially for customers already using a tape architecture,” Thompson said. “A conventional strategy might take nine months to integrate, where, in our case, it might be days or weeks.”

Spectra Logic Corp.

• 6285 Lookout Road, Boulder, CO 80301-3580

• www.spectralogic.com

• 303-449-6400

• Person in charge: Nathan Thompson, CEO

• Employees: 450 worldwide

• Revenue: $100 million

Thompson said that media companies, which have need of large data recording to accommodate digital storage, are principal clients. High-performance computing organizations are another, and one of the early adopters of the ArticBlue solution was a California company involved in genetic sequencing.

“We have to ensure absolute integrity of the data, so we have significant error correction and detection,” he said. Checksums is a principal solution the company brings to bear, checking the files as they progress through any number of physical layers.

“The volume of data we deal with is so high, that we have to have a very small error rate,” Thompson noted.,

Thompson himself has been in the computer business since starting sales of computer parts from his University of Colorado dorm room in 1979. Today his company employs 450 people worldwide, earning “north of $100 million” annually.

And while Spectra Logic may not be providing the flashiest storage system on the cloud, many cloud-storage providers might turn to them for large storage backup needs.

“It’s a market segmentation strategy: We can’t be all things to all people, so we’re sort of designed to address this 80 percent of the market,” said Thompson, noting his company’s size really only trails a handful of big players, such as IBM and Oracle’s tape solution that came from Storage Technology Corp.

“We do tend to have more old-line organizations (as clients) with massive storage needs — university research labs, energy exploration and genetics,” Thompson said. “But that’s really all over the map.”