Spectra Logic today announced that it has earned the top honors in the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Quality Awards, winning both the enterprise and midrange tape library categories. Sweeping the win for the 2012 Tape Library Quality awards marks the sixth time the company has won first place in a Quality Awards category, and caps a year of significant success and technological achievements, including the availability of 10GbE iSCSI connectivity, the commencement of LTO-6 shipments and the installation of the 380 PBs nearline tape archive for NCSA’s Blue Waters supercomputing system, which is one of the largest and most powerful supercomputers in the world.

“Our objective is to identify the most reliable products on the market. It seems when Spectra Logic Corp. is in it, the company wins it. The 'it' in this case is the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Quality Awards for tape libraries,” wrote Rich Castagna, editorial director for the storage media group for Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com, in the article, Spectra Logic Snares Midrange and Enterprise Tape Library Awards, which reported the results of the Quality Awards survey.

With the Quality Awards win, Spectra Logic outpaced competing midrange and enterprise tape library solutions from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Quantum and Dell. End-user respondents gave Spectra Logic particularly high marks for initial product quality, product reliability, and its knowledgeable sales force representatives and technical support personnel.

“Spectra Logic dominated this time around with the highest score in every [Enterprise] rating category. Spectra Logic’s performance in the midrange groups is equally impressive,” noted Castagna. “The broader story is how satisfied users are with the tape storage systems, underscoring how vendors continue to produce high-quality and innovative products.”

“Spectra Logic has built its reputation on innovation leadership and ensuring an unsurpassed end user experience. We have focused the past several years on innovating not just in the technology we deliver but also in the customer experience – from initial sales contact to ongoing support from our service team. It is a tremendous validation and honor to be recognized by our users and the readers of Storage magazine with the 2012 Quality Awards for enterprise and midrange tape libraries,” said Molly Rector, executive vice president of product management and worldwide marketing, Spectra Logic.

The Quality Awards recognition validates Spectra’s development strategy, which included releases in 2012 that expanded its data storage and archive capabilities with 10GbE iSCSI connectivity, Spectra TKLM encryption key management, and the shipping of LTO-6 drives and Spectra® certified LTO-6 media cartridges in its T-Series tape libraries. The addition of LTO-6 elevates all Spectra Terapack-based libraries (T200, T380, T680, T950 and T-Finity) to the PetaScale capacity level.

“We are enthusiastic about the kinds of problems that the capacity, feature set and price point of these systems address. Spectra PetaScale tape storage systems allow our customers to solve large data management and Big Data storage problems in fields ranging from HPC, to Genomics, to video storage, to Big Data, to surveillance, to Active Archive. The addition of LTO-6 means that Spectra's vision of the digital parking lot has been nearly realized,” noted Rector. “As we look toward 2013, unstructured data growth is continuing unabated and is creating new IT challenges and opportunities for storage vendors. We look forward to delivering new and exciting products and solutions in the coming year and remain committed to continuing to lead tape library system and software innovation for years to come.”

2012 Quality Awards: About the Survey

The Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com Quality Awards are designed to identify and recognize products that have proven their quality and reliability in actual use. Results are derived from a survey of qualified readers who assess products in five main categories: sales-force competence, initial product quality, product features, product reliability and technical support. In the sixth category, respondents are asked if they would repeat their purchase and buy the tape library again. The methodology incorporates statistically valid polling that eliminates market share as a factor. The objective is to identify the most reliable products on the market regardless of vendor name, reputation or size. Products are rated on a scale of 1.00 to 8.00, where 8.00 is the best score. A total of 378 respondents provided 468 midrange and enterprise-class tape library evaluations.

More information about Spectra Logic Corporation is available here.

Spectra and the Spectra Logic logo are registered trademarks of Spectra Logic Corporation. All rights reserved worldwide. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.