Quantum unveils a strong cold data storage model

Quantum, a leader of secondary storage, joined the IT Press Tour yesterday to cover in details the recent news about its Cold Data strategy.

Recognized for a long time as a trusted vendor thanks to its rich portfolio, Quantum continues to develop its products line with technologies developed internally but also from several acquisitions such Atavium, CatDV and I expect similar pattern with Pivot3 and EnCloudEn.

For sure it will contribute to improve the image of the company, again good on the product and technology side, but questionnable on the financial side. Since Jamie Lerner joined as CEO in 2018 I see some great progress. One of the visible effect is the hyperscaler adoption of Quantum product with more than 30EB deployed.

The company made a big splash with this Cold Data announcement that creates a real dynamism around several product if its portfolio.

When I read the press release I was surprised to read that tape and object storage can't be connected. But it exists a few solutions on the market that deliver this already such Fujifilm with Object Archive, Spectra Logic with BlackPearl, Atempo, Cohesity, Grau Data, Komprise, Nodeum, Point Software and Systems, QStar, StrongBox or Versity among others.

The company sells some point products to address this cold data need but the glue between them was limited form Quantum and very often relies on partners solutions. The firm has developed and release Artico but the product disappeared from the catalog and StorNext can do also some integration with tiering. Same remark with ATFS that should replace and extends Artico in the future, at least I hope.

So the new thing is the glue between the ActiveScale and Scalar tape libraries represented by a new storage class, the S3 and S3 Glacier API, a matrix-based model for tape libraries and tape drives, an easy consumption model inspired by the cloud and an attractive pricing model.

Quantum has made a very positive decision acquiring last year ActiveScale from Western Digital. Amplidata, the Belgium original company, behind ActiveScale software was first acquired by HGST, a business from WDC, in 2015. This surprising move was pretty strange as Quantum was an investor in the Belgium player. Identifying the need for Object Storage and without any product, Quantum has oemed this product as Lattus. The product disappeared for some time showing a hole not previously visible and then Quantum made this asset acquisition from WDC. The team has confirmed once again that object storage is a must-have technology for every storage vendor that addresses the secondary storage and cold data in particular. To get an update on the object storage market moves and dynamic, I invite you to check the timeline I refreshed a few months ago.

This initiative shows several key developments:

- a global access method model based on S3 and S3 Glacier APIs coupled with a lifecycle mechanism to move data between a "normal" S3 zone and a cold zone. In each zone, data are protected with BitSpread, the erasure coding engine invented by Amplidata, that delivers 15 x9s of durability. These 2 zones are exposed via a single namespace that hides the complexity of this data movement. In term of lifecycle, data can be moved also to public cloud as soon as they exposed S3.

- an extension to the disk-based cold data zone filled of tape drives. This entity is configured with multiple Scalar tape librairies arranged into a new protection scheme named 2D erasure coding. With this protection model, these libraries are organized into a RAIL (Redundant Array of Independent Libraries) mode. Data durability reach 19 x9s with the beauty to restore data from only one tape as the EC model works at the object group level and not at the object itself. The team had chosen a subtle projection for the equations over drives and librairies.

- and this offering is delivered as a cloud service and is promoted with a very compelling pricing model.

As of today it seems that only Quantum products are supported, I expect more tape libraries from HPE, IBM or Spectra Logic to be supported in a future release, same remark from public cloud supports.

I understand that CatDV could be used to create large index of all the content submitted to the secondary data farm.

This initiative and key announcement represents a major milestone for Quantum confirming that cold data is a real huge opportunity for vendors.from the vendor gives a new example of the new battle on the cold storage market segment. I expect some other key players in that segment to announce also some solution in the next few days so I invite the readers to watch and monitor carefully the market the news.