Spectra Logic Finds Success in HPC Market Focus

By Michael Feldman

August 25, 2009

Protecting data is probably one of the more mundane tasks of the datacenter administrator. That’s one reason why storage maker Spectra Logic has not exactly become a household name. The company specializes in tape and disk storage systems for data backups and archives. Based in Boulder, Colorado, Spectra Logic has been around for nearly 30 years, serving mid-sized and big enterprise users with a need for mission-critical data protection and HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management). But within the last 18 months, the company has put a special focus on high performance computing customers.

In particular, Spectra Logic wants to become the archive storage vendor of choice for large HPC installations, which typically need to manage petabytes of data. The company has a good start in making this a reality. Today their products are in 7 of the 10 largest TOP500 supercomputing sites, including the DOE national labs at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Argonne. In April, the company displaced Sun Microsystems at NASA Ames, replacing the 10 StorageTek 9310 silos with two of its top-of-the-line T950 tape library systems (and in the process, freeing up 1,400 square feet of space). It also has a presence at approximately half of the NSF TeraGrid sites and is looking to expand to the remaining half.

Spectra’s entry into HPC was mainly an outgrowth of its federal government business, which represents about a third of the company’s revenue. Over the years, it established accounts in essentially all US federal agencies. Its segue into the HPC side of these organizations was a natural one since many of these same agencies maintain in-house supercomputing infrastructure. Spectra also has HPC customers in the commercial space, in both the financial services sector and the oil and gas industry.

The company also maintains a customer advisory panel, and according to Molly Rector, Spectra Logic’s vice president for product management, 50 percent of the members are HPC users. The HPC group is helping Spectra guide its multi-year roadmap so that future storage product capabilities satisfy the demands of the supercomputing systems being planned for the early part of the next decade.

The competition in the archive and backup business is spread across many storage vendors, but at the top end, it is more restricted. According to Rector, their main rivals for high end tape storage are Sun Microsystems (StorageTek products) and IBM. In the 90s, StorageTek dominated the big tape archive space. With its acquisition by Sun Microsystems and now Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, the StorageTek story just seems to be getting more uncertain. Rector thinks customers are starting to look for alternatives and is hoping that the recent NASA AMES win is just the start of that trend.

Right now Spectra is also enjoying some of the advantages of being a privately-held company. Since it doesn’t have shareholders to satisfy, it has more freedom with investments and company strategy. “Being a private held, smaller company, we have a lot more flexibility to architect and design our products to meet unique customer needs,” says Rector. There’s probably some truth in that, given that IT companies that are fully exposed to Wall Street expectations have often struggled to evolve their product offerings, especially during market downturns.

Spectra has also managed to avoid being the target of a buyout. Last week the company reported its third consecutive year of profits, and a 12 percent increase, quarter over quarter. Spectra attributed the positive results to higher sales of the company’s very large and medium-sized tape libraries. Its main markets — HPC, media and entertainment, and federal government — have been among the most recession-proof.

If the company has a weakness in the HPC space, it’s in its partnerships. Currently, SGI is the only system vendor reselling Spectra’s tape storage gear for this market. The remainder is being sold directly via Spectra’s own sales force, which consists of about three dozen individuals. “Usually in these big HPC sites, it is our resources that are selling to them,” says Rector. Without a lot of company name recognition, it’s important to get system vendors on your side to take advantage of as many opportunities as possible, especially for the numerous mid-range system deployments in the commercial and academic sectors. According to Rector, the company is actively working to expand its HPC vendor partnerships.

The US is Spectra’s biggest market, but the company also maintains offices in Europe, where it has a handful of HPC deployments in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and France. Spectra also has deployments in Asia*.

At the big national lab HPC sites, Spectra is mainly selling its tape storage gear (T50e through T950) for nearline archive storage, that is, storage that is less frequently used than primary disk storage, but needs to be online for relatively quick access. For these big installations, the nearline storage will typically sit behind a DataDirect primary storage tier. The Spectra storage is slower, but denser, and not nearly as expensive to run power consumption-wise.

Spectra’s newer storage offerings, the disk-based nTier product line, have been deployed for some finance and oil & gas HPC applications, but have yet to make it to the big government supercomputing sites. The obvious advantage of disk-based archive storage is faster access time, but when paired with a tape-based archive system and a Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) application, users can realize a lot more flexibility in managing their data.

Spectra’s latest solution integrates disk- and tape-based archive/backup hardware with HSM and deduplication technology via its BlueScale management software. Since deduplication basically substitutes a pointer for redundant data, it typically is able to offer a 15:1 or better compression ratio, depending on the dataset. That means that not only can you store 15 times as much data on the media, but also you can effectively send 15 times as much data across a network. Rector says they are starting to see some traction for deduplication with commercial HPC customers that maintain big tape archives in a central repository. The idea is that remote site data can be sent to the central archive very efficiently, since duplicated data doesn’t need to be sent at all, just accounted for. All this can take place transparently once the policies are in place.

Spectra has also added features to the latest BlueScale software to make tape administration less labor intensive. To that end, version 10.6 adds a handful of new capabilities that enable tapes to behave more like disk arrays, including “hot spare” drives for remote failover, proactive notification of storage components reaching their lifetime thresholds, and auto-discovery of new media. In disk storage as well as other areas of the datacenter, replacing human administration with management software has become a universal trend driven by economics. “Our development goal is that the expectations you have of your disk, you should have of your tape as well,” says Rector. “Those get closer and closer together all the time.”

* The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Spectra was not present in the Asian market.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire