Spectra Logic in Collaboration With Premier US R&D Laboratory on Open-Source Application

Spectra Logic, Corp. believes that collaboration and partnership are a source of opportunity and improvement in business.

In fact, Spectra’s business development team works with customers and ecosystem and channel partners alike to plan, develop and deliver the company’s solutions. The company is considered an advisor to many of the world’s key storage users and has become a partner to its customers – accommodating requests spanning from new code creation to feature enhancements.

In that vein, Spectra has published several open-source software projects in public repositories to share code with the storage community. The company’s platform of choice to make such developments available is GitHub, a web-based hosting service used by over 36 million developers worldwide and more than 2.1 million businesses and organizations.

For example, software like Spectra’s Eon Browser, a free open-source interface to move files between local storage, and the Spectra BlackPearl Converged Storage System, has been placed in a publicly accessible repository on GitHub so anyone can download it, see the source code, and submit suggested enhancements. As it currently stands, it has contributed over 37 repositories to GitHub, all of which are licensed to permit modifications and redistribution of its source code.

Spectra Provides Custom XML
In an effort to enrich the Spectra tape library user experience, Spectra has continued to publish code to GitHub for public consumption over the years.

Recently, one of the foremost R&D facilities for science and technology in the US required new BlueScale software features that would allow their Spectra tape libraries to confirm tape locations. The organization’s team created the Spectra API, which launches the verification of library inventory while High Performance Storage System (HPSS) software is running. It provided an XML interface that the customer could use to create this Python 3 application to automate the XML interface/commands to the tape library. The new XML command checks every barcode in the tape library to confirm that they remain in the system. The research laboratory has created a public domain tool from the Spectra script that is available for all company’s end users to contribute to or use.

The customized XML library interface uses Spectra’s BlueScale software to add a number of commands that can be leveraged to automate the interface to the Spectra TFinity ExaScale Tape Library. The library is able to run a security audit across all chambers/slots to capture discrepancies between physical and logical tape locations. The audit can be performed in the background while HPSS is running, without interference to production.

The feature was implemented in the BlueScale software version known as 12.8.01. This was needed to satisfy requirements by the customer to track every piece of media on a monthly basis, as well as track any physical entrance to the library itself. This was a collaboration between Spectra support, Spectra engineering and the user themselves. It is the latest addition to the library of XML commands that can be used with all of the vendor’s enterprise tape systems.

Additionally, several customers have requested the ability to have XML commands to move tapes between slots and drives with the intent to run manual testing of tape drives. Spectra plans to implement this in a future software release of BlueScale. In the interim, the support team implemented HTTP calls that allow them to initiative moves from slots to drives.

Customers can use these HTTP calls to manually test their drives. The Python3 application is available to the public via GitHub to enable easier use of the Spectra XML library interface.

GitHub, a subsidiary of Microsoft Corp., is an American web-based hosting service for version control using Git. It is mostly used for computer code. It offers all of the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. It provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project*.

* Wikipedia contributors (June 16, 2019). GitHub – Wikipedia