Spectra Logic updates StorCycle lifecycle management software

StorCycle software is designed to help global organisations solve the challenges of exponential data growth by providing a better understanding of their data, migrating data to free up primary storage, protecting against ransomware attacks and enabling disaster recovery copies of data.

The new features in StorCycle 3.5 allow tiering and protection of cloud data, provide increased protection against ransomware attacks and boost metadata searchability and accessibility, among other benefits.

The company also announced a free 60-day trial of StorCycle software for IT professionals who want to gain insight into their organisational data to determine storage capacity and cost savings.

“With new cloud mandates and mounting ransomware attacks, it’s more critical than ever for organisations to get visibility into their data and manage that data for its lifetime,” said Jeff Braunstein, director of product management for Spectra Logic. “Organisations need to know how much data they have, where it is located, how to find it when needed and where to protect it long-term. StorCycle is built to meet those requirements.”

StorCycle’s new features include S3 Source Storage, allowing users to migrate or copy S3 cloud data to a BlackPearl object storage device, and data encryption. Previously, data encryption was provided in StorCycle via the encryption capabilities of the storage targets themselves. Now, StorCycle can also encrypt the data as it is moved or copied to a storage target, providing users with an easy method to protect all migrated data.

It is also now possible for a single HTML file link to be left for an entire job/project, rather than for each migrated file, making it easier to access and restore data. With this feature, the structure remains clean and organised on the source.

In addition, Job Queue Priority Control allows users to prioritise jobs in the queue, giving users greater control over job execution order. Daily capacity limitations, meanwhile, mean administrators can set daily restore limits for users to regulate the amount of data returned to primary storage. This ensures that the data returned to primary storage stays beneath a pre-determined threshold to maintain system and performance advantages.

For organisations with multiple StorCycle installations on the same network, the software can now link to other instances and provide a single search window. This feature makes the search for migrate/store projects much easier. In addition, instead of pre-set age ranges for data migration, StorCycle now enables users to customise the age range that triggers a migration. For example, a user might set the policy to migrate all data that is 97 days old and older.

Finally, StorCycle leverages the failover capabilities of hyperconverged Virtual Machine (VM) systems to provide high availability. If a VM instance of StorCycle fails, a VM instance of StorCycle will be auto-restarted on a new node.

“As an enterprise technology partner with a focus on data centre modernisation, we see organisations struggling to manage growing data sets every day,” said Mat Brown, president at One Technology. “With Spectra’s StorCycle we have an elegant solution for clients to solve data issues across their entire infrastructure. Our customers like StorCycle because it is easy to deploy, streamlines their workflows and automates the management of their data. The byproduct ends up being improved infrastructure performance and lower costs.”