Asset Management Q&A: Hossein ZiaShakeri, SVP, Spectra Logic

Last month, storage-solutions developer Spectra Logic took its company in a new direction, introducing the concept of “deep storage” to asset management.

Hossein ZiaShakeri, Spectra Logic

Spectra outlined a vision for a low-cost, massively scalable deep-storage tier that can store data virtually forever. As part of the announcement, the company unveiled the industry’s first native RESTful interface to robotic tape-storage systems, Deep Simple Storage Service (DS3), as well as its first product to support this interface, BlackPearl.

To learn more about this technological advance for Spectra Logic, SVG sat down with SVP Hossein ZiaShakeri to shed some light on long-term data-archival strategies.

What is “deep storage?”
Deep storage is an extremely low-cost, dense, and massively scalable object storage with the following attributes:

• Long-term (able to span storage technology’s lifetime)
• Affordable (low cost per gigabyte per year, low environmental burden)
• Secure (access to data by only authorized users, data encryption supported)
• High data integrity (data is validated inflight and during its lifetime)
• Easily remote-deployable (plugs into current Web infrastructure)
• Easily accessible (using modern Web services API – DS3)

Why did this development make sense for Spectra Logic?
We see tape as the current leading storage medium for deep storage, with such attractive properties as data integrity, longevity, and cost. However, we found that its market is being limited by the complexity of deployment in the environment. DS3 plus deep-storage technology makes tape easily available to the applications and end users; this will make tape more of a mainstream storage technology.

In what ways does BlackPearl enable this deep-storage workflow?
BlackPearl provides the Web-service interface (DS3) that allows clients to connect to tape or any future storage technology in this very modern manner.

What does this strategy mean for the future of the company?
Several things. One, we plan on expanding our revenue and market share through the acquisition of more tape/library customers behind BlackPearl systems. Two, [we plan on] continuing on our culture of innovation and becoming the innovation leader of deep-storage systems through BlackPearl and future product deliveries. And, three, this also gives us access to markets that traditionally may not have used tapes in the past.