Beyond the recent announcement around ransomware advanced features added to their “classic” product line, Spectra Logic also introduced a new software solution that radically changes how users will use data dispersed on various locations and storage silos.

This product, named Vail, is defined as a distributed multi-cloud data management software that logically consolidates data from their location via a global namespace and exposes this layer via the de-facto standard access method S3 API. Vail groups and unifies on-premises storage entities and public clouds, and offers a workflow capability between these data residences to leverage cloud services. Data belongs to this global virtual space, and there is no need to extract or transform any data.

Vail also receives some security oriented features such as encryption, locking, versioning, multi-site copy to increase redundancy and a Glacier-like flavour. For this last aspect, it reminds us what Quantum just announced, confirming a real trend on the market.

It is deployed via a set of Vail nodes on a VM, for example, loosely coupled, and installed at various locations to offer a discrete access point.

Spectra is new to this domain, developing again a pure software product that should surprise the market. In fact, Spectra detects and answers users’ needs with a radical new approach that is really open considering a very flexible storage device support. Execution to trigger adoption will be key here, and we’ll also see how the market and competition will react.

Spectra creates a real portfolio effect coupling BlackPearl, StorCycle, tape libraries and public clouds but also file servers, NAS or object storage deployed at various sites. It finally delivers what Philippe Nicolas from Coldago Research defines as a U3 model, i.e a Universal, Unify and Ubiquitous data and storage infrastructure.