Spectra Logic Improves StorCycle With Various Upgrades

Spectra Logic has rolled out significant enhancements to StorCycle, its software solution that revolutionizes storage lifecycle management. With the latest release, StorCycle 3.2 becomes the de facto standard in delivering storage lifecycle management. The new enhancements ensure that an organization’s data is identified, migrated, accessed, and protected on the right tier, at the right time, throughout its lifespan, providing maximum value to organizations that rely on data to drive their business.

StorCycle is a storage lifecycle management software solution that ensures data is stored on the right tier throughout its lifecycle for greater IT and budgetary efficiencies. Interoperable with Linux and Windows, StorCycle scans primary storage for inactive files and migrates them to a lower cost tier of storage, which includes any combination of cloud storage, object storage disk, network-attached storage (NAS) and object storage tape. StorCycle migrates data, without changing original formats, and allows easy access to all data including data migrated to higher latency storage mediums like cloud “cold” tiers and tape. Other data management solutions typically time out and error when retrieving files from these longer-latency, lower-cost storage targets.

StorCycle was created to track data forever if needed, and its database can scale to hundreds of billions of objects or files. Combined with a bandwidth that keeps up with near-real-time applications, such as migrating or restoring up to hundreds of terabytes per day, StorCycle enables true storage lifecycle management for organizations that need lasting protection and access to data which is no longer active, but still critical to retain.

The latest release of StorCycle delivers the following new benefits:

• Scheduled Delete – users can configure automatic deletions of data migrated/stored by a project after StorCycle retains it for a specified number of days. Users will get email notifications about pending deletions five days before data is deleted.
• Delete Migrate/Store Projects – users can reclaim storage space by manually (and immediately) deleting files that they uploaded to StorCycle when the files are no longer needed, are simply test files or are archived by mistake.
• Improved Support of Customer Symlinks – users can now archive and restore their own symbolic links that they created on their file systems.
• Rerun Existing Jobs – users can now run a recurring, scheduled job immediately and can rerun one-time project archives (for example, when they need to add more files to the directory after an archive operation) by simply clicking an icon to rerun the project.
• CIFS/SMB Support with Linux – users with mixed Windows/Linux environments can run one instance of StorCycle on Linux. StorCycle running on a Linux server supports NFS and CIFS/SMB sources. StorCycle running on Windows supports CIFS/SMB.
• Restore Jobs Processed First – restore jobs are prioritized at the top of the job queue when more than 10 jobs are actively running on the StorCycle solution.
• Background Database Indexing – automatically adds background database indexing to deliver a two order of magnitude increase in search times for files and objects.

“While StorCycle software reduces the overall cost of storing data by up to 70 percent, true storage lifecycle management is about more than cost savings,” said Spectra Logic CEO Nathan Thompson. “Our customers rely on data to drive their business decisions and need insight, control, access and protection of their data through its entire lifetime. StorCycle’s latest feature set builds on our experience helping customers solve their complex storage challenges. With the new Scheduled Delete feature, in particular, customers have even greater control over their data with the ability to set timetables for worry-free data expiration to meet compliance and retention requirements.”

About StorCycle Storage Lifecycle Management Software

Spectra’s StorCycle was developed from the ground up to address the challenge of storage lifecycle management by identifying, migrating, accessing and preserving large data sets for the entire lifespan of that data – be it short-term or forever. StorCycle identifies cold data residing on expensive primary storage and transparently migrates it to a secure Perpetual Tier, which includes any combination of cloud storage, object storage disk, network-attached storage (NAS) and object storage tape. With StorCycle’s unique Project Archive feature, users can tag and move entire project data sets making the software ideal for preserving data in fields such as computational and seismic research, oil and gas studies, semiconductor designs, genomics, media and entertainment, weather forecasting, autonomous vehicle research, and other fields where large amounts of machine-generated data are created.

StorCycle initiates true storage lifecycle management by automatically scanning and moving data based on age and size. With the use of HTML Links or Symbolic Links, and a web-based search, data in the Perpetual Tier is easily accessible by users in a semi-transparent or transparent manner. StorCycle stores data in open formats, such as CIFS or NFS file systems, LTFS tape or native cloud formats, so that data is always accessible. Data can also be migrated to the cloud for sharing and collaboration and to enable cloud workflows. For best practices in data storage, StorCycle can also automatically make additional copies of data for disaster recovery purposes, including on tape for physically separated air-gapped copies that protect data from ransomware and other types of malware. StorCycle can be implemented as standalone software using public cloud storage or existing network-attached storage, or combined with Spectra storage hardware to create a complete storage solution.

To learn more about storage lifecycle management, download the new white paper here.