Spectra Logic has always been a company that interests me. I have often found that they remind me of Apple. They continue to innovate in a market (Tape Libraries) that many have long given up for "commoditization". They were the first or one of the first in such tape library innovations as: on-board interface cards for flexibility in configurations, iSCSI, on-board encryption, vertical tape cartridge mounting and disk based tape libraries. So I found it ironic that when they announced their new disk offering they draw an analogy to the Apple iPhone. The basic premise is that Spectra readily admits that they did not invent disk or even disk to disk backup but that they are going to bring it all together under one interface while providing a top notch user experience. That's a lofty goal to be certain, so I sat down with Ric Poland, Senior Product Manager for Spectra Logic to discuss the Spectra Logic disk solutions called nTier.

With the nTier product line Spectra is focusing on the secondary market, fully aware that the primary storage is not something they want to compete in. Secondary Storage is storage that is typically used for backup data, old files, archive etc...

Spectra Logic has identified an interesting characteristic of the secondary storage market. Most second tier disk solutions are relatively "point products" in nature - meaning that they only solve one problem. For example, if you want disk to disk backup that incorporates data deduplication there is an appliance for that. If you want a NAS to store older files, there's another server and more storage. Need to run a Backup application?  Buy another server.  You can end up with a bunch of servers, a bunch of storage or both - each doing one specific function. Spectra believes it can address this shortcoming with the nTier line of disk products.

Spectra's goal is to change that 'one server/storage appliance for each application' paradigm. The initial nTier offering is the nTier 5700. Shipping in the summer, the unit will be configured with 6 blades, each blade containing ten 1TB SATA drives for a total of 60 drives and 60 TBs (raw) per 4U unit. What makes this unit unique and the component that Spectra believes will be its key to the market, is that each 4U has a windows storage server built into the back-plane. Running Windows Storage Server 2003, each 4U unit out of the box can provide CIFS and NFS file services (NAS), a backup to disk repository and the ability to run either backup server software or ILM software. At the time of release Spectra also plans to offer a Data De-duplication option and an email archive option. In the future Spectra will offer Encryption and possibly a WORM based file-system.

As I stated earlier, all this can be done today, but not on one box. Also nTier will allow you to mix and match features. You can have one volume that is straight NAS, another that is a Data De-dupe volume and another that would be encrypted. A tape library can be attached directly to the nTier allow for tapes to be created locally without having to travel across the network again. Finally, the units can all be managed with Spectra's BlueScale management interface that is currently used to manager their tape libraries, a fairly unique capability.  As tape libraries age and are due to be replaced this would make a compelling case for considering Spectra for all of your non-primary storage be it disk, tape or both. Not to be overlooked would be a single point of support for your all of your secondary storage, other suppliers that say they can offer this are typically OEMing one component or another and are susceptible to more support issues.

In addition to redundant power supplies, the "server" component of the unit's boot drive is mirrored and the storage blades all run RAID 6. Raid 6 is basically a double parity RAID configuration, and is almost a requirement for high capacity SATA drives. If one of the SATA drives fails, it can take up to 20 hours to rebuild the raid set. During this 20 hour rebuild you would be running with no disk redundancy and a second drive failure could mean total data loss. With a RAID 6 configuration you would still have redundant protection while the new parity stripe is built.

The road map for nTier includes the introduction of a smaller capacity unit for customers that don't have the storage requirements of the nTier 700. The nTier 500 will scale from 2-16TB, and the 700 will scale from 10-60TB. The nTier 900 is to be released soon after the 500 and 700. The product will also offer clustering for redundancy and greater capacity. Expectations are that the 900 will scale to about 480TBs. Compliance-related abilities like a WORM file-system and data integrity checking are a little further down the road.

There are a few challenges to Spectra as they enter this market. First, they are late. The Data Duplication Appliance wars are well under way. The primary competitor in the space, Data Domain, has a large installed base and is going to raise a ton of equity when it IPO's in a few weeks. I am already seeing battle lines getting drawn over how and when the data de-duplication process should happen (look for a future article on the different data de-duplication techniques very soon). The short answer for right now is that Spectra and Data Domain do the data de-duplication at different points in the process. A case can be made for both and we'll walk through that soon. EMC has now entered the space in a big way with their acquisition of Avamar. Also Spectra Logic does not have the consistency checking algorithm that some of their competitors have. This can be a nice feature if backup sets are being stored solely on these devices and for a long time.

Clearly there are a few things that the Spectra unit will be able to do right out of the gate that its competitors cannot. For example, it can do data de-duplication on the file system itself and has the ability to run the backup up or ILM software on the appliance. Many of my clients that have data de-duplication devices wish they could use it as a data de-dupe file-system in addition to just backup. Also, because it is Windows based Spectra or the users themselves will be able to buy software applications to fill in initial missing features like replication for DR. Windows does bring some concerns, for me anyway, that will need to be addressed, like network I/O and stability. Lastly I am concerned that running a lot of applications on a single server without a server virtualization capability could be problematic.  To be fair, Spectra is going to come out with a list of approved applications and which applications will work together. I feel sorry for anyone that got assigned that job, be thankful Spectra is taking on that task and not you (or me).

If you look at the nTier 500 or 700 for its simplest deliverable, high density file services, there is value. Being able to move old files off of your primary file servers and storing them on the nTier is very compelling. Add to this the ability to run de-duplication on that data and in the future encrypt it the story becomes even more compelling. A fully configured box with 60TB's of storage (raw) is about $100k, an excellent price point when you consider that this is more than just a 'dumb box of disk'. Assuming that you will get about 48TBs usable per box and further assume that Spectra gets the same 15 to 1 storage savings as the result of data-duplication that we see from other suppliers, that 48TBs is going to look like 600TBs.

For Spectra Logic tape library customers, consideration of the nTier disk is a no brainer and it should be on the short list for anyone that is looking at a disk-to-disk backup appliance. If you are considering disk-to-disk backup and one of the other common uses for tier two disk or see value in centralizing more of your storage software functionality the nTier product becomes even more attractive.