New major release for ActiveScale

Quantum, a historic leader in secondary storage, makes serious progress as a result of a clear strategy integrating new technologies, people and companies via some key M&As.

Following the acquisition of ActiveScale (AS) product from Western Digital in March 2020, the team has not only repackage the product, reposition the solution but also actively continue to develop and iterate on software features that maintains its object storage solution among the leaders in the category. It was confirmed by the Coldago Map for Object Storage where Quantum moves up to the Challenger segment and we expect new positioning in the next Map in the Fall 2021.

The team has just announced AS 6.0 as a major release to break limits and delivers new capabilities. It is available via subscription and on the new X200 platform, a system based Supermicro hardware following the partnership between the 2 companies. This X200 system is a converged model collapsing the access layer and the data layer, reducing nodes and roles of various systems, it gives more dense approach and reduces footprint in 12 RU. It is a 4RU Twin Server, each with 2 compute modules and 30, 60 or 90 18TB HDDs. In this base configuration in 12RU, each 4 RU chassis gives 1620TB (90 * 18TB) so a total of 4860 TB raw is obtained meaning 405TB / RU. The system delivers up to 51GB/s and 30 billions objects, a real new dimension for such solution. To scale on demand you can add any number of 4U90 JBODs or additional servers. The X200 complements the entry model P100E3 with its 432TB.

AS6 targets the capacity oriented projects thus more secondary storage use cases with the requirement to be highly durable. Based on Amplidata erasure coding technology named BitSpread, AS DDP aka Dynamic Data Placement reaches 19 x 9 of data durability. It is perfectly complemented by BitDyamics and BitLog technologies now known as AS Dynamic Data Repair to provide a super resilient data platform.

AS also leverages a strong consistency model even with 3 sites and we wonder how this can be achieved without real performance impact as it is promoted by Quantum. We need more details here, the "no impact" implies some design constraints especially beyond 1 site. In term of access method, NFS and S3 are supported and we expect a SMB layer soon. We'll learn more things in October when The IT Press Tour will meet Quantum especially around new product and how things get integrated with product such ATFS and StorNext.