facebookpixel

What is Cold Data? And Why You Need a Cold Storage Strategy.

ActiveScale

Join Quantum  on October 5 for a major announcement on the Future of Cold Storage: Register Here  

If you have followed International Data Corp (IDC), the well-known technology analyst firm over the last few years, you may be familiar with their work on the Global Datasphere, a measure and forecast of the amount of new data created and stored across the globe annually. Their latest analysis reports that over 64 Zettabytes of data were created in 2020. That’s about 32 trillion (2) hour movies, that’s three stacks of DVDs (without jewel cases) to the sun.  

IDC expects continued growth compounding at 19% a year into the foreseeable future. Data created over the next three years will amount to more than all the data created over the past 30 years; three times more data will be created over the next five years than was created in the past five years.  

Remarkably, only 2% of that data is being stored for future use and analysis. Expectations are that stored data too will continue to grow, particularly because every forward-looking organization is recognizing the value of data as the vehicle of digital transformation. Data is driving the opportunity to create value, to invent new revenue streams, and effectively make and confirm strategic directions. 

Which brings us to the topic of cold data…  

What is Cold Data? 

Production workloads naturally access lots of data. If you think of data as having a lifecycle, ‘hot’ data is data that is actively being used, requiring high performance access while ‘warm’ data is still frequently accessed over a given timeframe. Cold data is inactive data that is never or infrequently accessed. Industry analysts project that 60% of all stored data is cold data.1  

Screen Shot 2021 09 28 at 2.25.06 PM

Increasingly, cold data is being preserved not because an organization is required to save the data, but because the data is being recognized as having inherent and potential value. 

Classically, cold data was limited to data that was preserved to meet regulatory or in-house compliance policies that require retention for some number of years. The data often was simply written to tape media, taken offline, and moved to a storage facility for the rare event that the data would ever need to be accessed again – not so anymore.  

Why You Need a Cold Storage Strategy 

So, our whole orientation toward cold data is changing, especially as its value gets recognized – on the one hand and on the other hand, its enormity and its growth becomes overwhelming. With the digitization of everything, the incessant data collection of sensors, the volume of video and imagery sources, plus the data-intensive requirements and periodic recalibration of data analysis, artificial intelligence and deep learning workloads, the amount of cold data that must be stored is going to grow, and its application and use cannot and will not remain dormant. 

Key Considerations for a More Focused Cold Storage IT Strategy  

As cold data grows, it requires a more focused IT strategy and approach to meet the infrastructure requirements. Key considerations include: 

Budget and technology limitations. Whereas data storage requirements continue to rise, IT budgets cannot keep pace. Moreover, while solid state disk drives (SSDs) will approach the cost and capacity characteristics of today’s hard disk drives over the next several years, HDD density growth is flattening, leaving no option for a lower-cost tier of random-access storage (which has been the most effective strategy to maintain accessibility while reducing cost). DNA-based storage, while shows promise, is many years from widespread adoption and commercialization, and initially will only serve as the coldest of cold archives (i.e., relatively simple to encode, but hard to read). The largest cloud providers, for example, have already discovered that they need to rely on slower, lower-cost media to meet these constraints. 

Forever archiving. Virtually all our knowledge, in whatever form and whatever topic, has been digitized. More and more, data needs to be preserved for its historic relevance (we’ll want to look at this again) and its future value (we’ll want to analyze this again). Research data, medical records, media content, genomic data, and AI/ML modeling data are all obvious candidates that must be preserved for years and decades. Data is information and information is data. With continuous advancement of deep learning algorithms, we will continue to expand our vehicles to mine value and innovate new uses. Cold storage needs to be secure, durable, and self-healing for decades. 

Online, unfettered access for enrichment, value creation, and innovation. Extracting value from growing data stores becomes even more problematic. To extract value, you need to know what data you have and have meaningful ways to organize and find relevant subsets. We need more data (the metadata) about the data to maintain and grow its relevance. This requires analysis and enrichment of the data itself both upfront and over time for continued enhancement. To do so, the data must remain easily accessible for the long term. Currently, organizations are challenged to meet these goals with inhouse platforms due to cost constraints. Often reliant on public cloud storage, data sovereignty and control become major issues; plus, accessibility is hampered by access and storage charges that spike when cold data is accessed. 

As we look forward to the future, the demands of cold data growth will ultimately give rise to new storage and service solutions.  

The Future of Cold Storage Roundtable – October 5, 2021 

Register here  for our October 5th (8:30AM PT) roundtable on the Future of Cold Storage, and receive the IDC InfoBrief, “Data Deluge: Why Every Enterprise Needs a Cold Storage Strategy.”  

______________ 

1 Note that, whereas there is a bit of a preoccupation around the amount of stored data that is cold, in fact, 99% of all data is cold. As 98% of data doesn’t get saved, this guarantees that this data will never get accessed again, so, by our definition, this data too is cold. That’s a lot of lost opportunity. 

The post What is Cold Data? And Why You Need a Cold Storage Strategy. appeared first on Quantum Blog .

To view our Partner blog, click here

What is Object Storage and What to Look for in an Object Storage System

ActiveScale

Unstructured data is growing at up to 60% per year and will make up 80% of all data on the planet by 2025. For this reason, object storage solutions are entering a new era of mainstream adoption and use. Object storage allows you to easily store large amounts of unstructured data in a highly scalable and cost-effective way, making it a logical choice for backup and archiving, data analytics, and large, active unstructured data sets.

What Are Objects?

In its simplest form, object storage is a storage system where data elements are stored in repositories called objects. Objects can be of variable size, and are not only defined by their content, but also by their metadata and a unique identifier. Metadata can include simple things like creation date and time, but also unique characteristics about the data and searchable summary information. In contrast to accessing a file name and location within a file system, an object is accessed by a unique identifier created when the object is created and then used to retrieve the object later.

Built for Scale

A key element of a well-designed object storage system is its ability to scale gracefully, to grow from small terabyte-scale configurations up to massive scale, supporting billions of objects and 100s of petabytes in capacity. To prevent bottlenecks, object storage requires a ‘scale-out’ software architecture. This provides an expandable flat name space to address billions of objects and allows computing, networking, and storage resources to expand as the system’s capacity grows to maintain performance.

Always Available Access

Objects stores are accessed over a standard Ethernet network in one of two ways, through API calls or HTTP/HTTPS requests, most commonly through software in the form of web-based applications, packaged and open-source software solutions, and custom-developed in-house applications and scripts. Today, most object stores are accessed via AWS S3, a de facto standard command set. Most notably, the S3 protocol runs securely over Ethernet, making it easy to integrate object storage into your computing environment and access your data from varying distances, across private networks, WANs, and the Internet.

Durability, Security, and Availability

Another key attribute of object storage is the emphasis in their design of data durability, security, and availability. With so much data being stored, it’s important that the system and data are always accessible, and data is securely stored and confidently retained over a long period of time, for years and sometimes, decades.

Object storage systems use erasure coding, a data protection technique superior to classic RAID and storage replication technologies. Erasure coding breaks an object up into many piece parts, called shards, then calculates and maintains multiple copies of parity information for these shards; the data shards and parity shards are then distributed across the underlying hardware infrastructure. This ensures continuity of data and data access in the case of a data loss, component failure, or a site disaster.

Not All Object Storage Systems Are the Same

While object storage systems have a lot of commonalities, it is also important that not all object storage systems are the same. For many systems, the concept of scale only extends to the terabyte range and reliability and availability capabilities don’t meet the needs of massive enterprise deployments.

Performance at scale. Whereas scalability is a key attribute promoted by many vendors, implementations can suffer as the system scales, causing painful, performance-crushing data rebalancing across system resources. This forces customers to manage a fleet of object storage systems despite their original goal of a simple, scalable solution.

Recommendation: Seek real-world references of customers that are running single name space instances that scale to at least a petabyte in scale, and even higher if your capacity requirements extend into 10’s or 100’s of petabytes.

Efficiency. A well-designed system should be manageable at any scale, from terabytes to exabytes, by a single administrator on a part-time basis.

Recommendation: Go beyond the demo to truly understand the system’s design and management toolset available. Bypass the downloadable UI-centric demoware to consider a ‘proof-of-concept’ deployment to validate the system design and applicability to your use case.

Proactive data protection. With the amount of the data you are storing, its security, availability, and protection against failure, is paramount.

Recommendation: Look for advanced proactive data integrity verification to guarantee data consistency over the long term and always-on, cloud-based monitoring to support your efforts.

An everlasting archive. Most object storage systems naturally grow over time and evolve to support additional use cases. The object storage solution you deploy is a key strategic asset for both mining and preserving your organization’s data assets for the long term.

Recommendation: Consider your object storage vendor as a strategic partner working with you to protect and extract value from your digital assets. Value vendor longevity and understand how well systems preserve your data and maintain data accessibility when transitioning to new generations of software and hardware.

About Quantum ActiveScale

Quantum ActiveScale is an enterprise-class object storage solution designed from the ground up for data durability, security, and availability of massive unstructured data sets and use cases ranging from terabytes to exabytes in scale. With S3 compatibility and an optimized two-layer storage architecture, ActiveScale simply and cost-effectively scales performance and capacity without bound in support of analytical workloads, active archiving, long term retention, and cold data storage. Learn more at: www.quantum.com/object-storage

To view our Partner blog, click here

Quantum Leads End-user Survey for Secondary Storage

ActiveScale

coldago logo

In the most recent end-user survey from Coldago Research , Quantum leads all vendors as the top brand for secondary storage.  Coldago’s April 2021 report surveyed over 2,000 end-users across SMB and enterprises about their brand preferences on a wide range of storage types and applications.  In secondary storage, Quantum is the leading brand. 

secondary storage

With the growth in secondary storage including object storage, Quantum offers a wide range of products to serve our customer’s needs.  These market segments are poised for growth.  According to IDC “Object storage accounts for the largest part of the public cloud storage market and continued to experience significant growth (31% in 2019)[1].  With that level of growth, customers need a wide portfolio of secondary storage products. 

End User Survey, Top US/EMEA brands for Secondary Storage

“Coldago Research unveils its end-users survey 2021 addressing perceptions, opinions, needs and priorities. We also asked users’ to rank vendors in various categories and for secondary storage, Quantum arrives 1st both in USA and Europe confirming the corporate and product strategy initiated a few years ago with new products, technology developments, acquisitions and talent recruitments that started to pay off”, said Philippe Nicolas, analyst at Coldago Research. “As a pioneer of secondary storage, Quantum continues to offer large, diverse and broad offerings targeting from small configurations to very large-scale environments, whatever is the technology, storage media, architecture and access methods making their solutions a real universal, unified and ubiquitous approach”, concludes Nicolas.

At Quantum, we’re pleased with the recognition that IT professionals have bestowed in this survey.  Over the last few years, we’ve made numerous improvements to our entire portfolio.  Here’s just a quick summary:

  • ActiveScale object storage – Multiple new releases that provide object locking, small object aggregation, and advanced troubleshooting.  New hardware included the P100E3 3-node platform for smaller customers and the new X200 platform for more performance and scale. 
  • Scalar tape – Introduction of multi-factor authentication builds upon the value of Active Vault, a feature available only in Quantum’s Scalar tape libraries to secure critical off-line data against ransomware attacks. The new feature makes unauthorized access extremely difficult, and underscores Quantum’s commitment to innovation for preserving and protecting valuable customer data.
  • DXi backup appliances – New features include Secure Snapshots and others in collaboration with Veeam, including multi-tiered backup and replication to Quantum DXi appliances, across sites, to the cloud and to Scalar tape libraries.

“The Coldago report demonstrates strong customer satisfaction across the full line of Quantum’s secondary storage products,” said Bruno Hald, Quantum’s GM for Secondary storage. “We are a customer-driven organization and have delivered a series of innovation for a full range of customers, from SMB, larger enterprises, and to our hyperscale customers.  We look forward to providing them with additional products and services to improve their bottom line”. 

[1] Source:  IDC report, Cold Storage Services in the Public Cloud IaaS Market, #WC2020087, Sept 1, 2020

Learn more at https://www.coldago.com/ and read the source report: https://www.coldago.net/eusurvey

To view our Partner blog, click here

A Super Week with Supermicro – Plus, Supermicro Open Storage Summit – July 27-29

ActiveScale

Last week, we announced an exciting new collaboration with Supermicro,  the world’s fastest growing IT company. I am sure you know Supermicro for its high efficiency servers, storage, and networking products. That’s part of the story, but not all. Here at Quantum, the big news is that ActiveScale Object Storage Software 6.0 is now available through Supermicro, its resellers and system integrators on a worldwide basis. This is the first time ever that ActiveScale software has been offered as a software-only solution available on qualified Supermicro hardware platforms. 

ASblog

ActiveScale 6.0 object storage software is an S3-compatible, feature-rich, scale-out system known for its robustness in support of backup, active archiving, and long-term retention use cases. You often see ActiveScale solutions wherever there is lots of data. Think genomic research centers, video production, IoT, and deep-learning app environments. 

With ActiveScale 6.0, scalability is unlimited. By adding additional scale-out nodes, organizations can seamlessly expand capacity, performance, and object count without compromising data durability, security, and availability. Dynamic Data Placement, a key ActiveScale feature, distributes data processing across all system resources using real-time heuristics to balance I/O workloads as the system scales. This prevents hotspots and the need for rebalancing that is an object storage system killer, inherent in many system designs that employ static or deterministic data layout policies. ActiveScale is built for scale, not only with respect to performance, but moreover, to ensure that all the data, from terabytes to exabytes, is always accessible, and is securely and reliably maintained throughout its lifecycle that can extend to years or decades. 

The first Supermicro ActiveScale solution employs a Supermicro SuperStorage 4U90 server , a high density, high capacity dual-server configuration with 90 drives per chassis. You can stack 9 chassis in a standard (1.2m depth) data center rack for a total raw capacity of 14.6 petabytes and 30 billion objects Expand further by adding additional racks and chassis for unlimited scalability. For more details on the total solution, check out the reference architecture on the Supermicro website. 

image

SuperStorage 6049SP-DE1CR90 

Attend Supermicro Open Storage Summit  – July 27-29. Quantum will be there! 

Quantum will be participating in Supermicro’s annual event along with Intel, Nutanix, WekaIO, RedHat, and others. Join us on Day 2 (July 28) for a day dedicated to ‘Cloud-Enabled Software Defined Storage.’   

Frederik De Schrijver, Quantum’s ActiveScale Product Lead, is participating in a panel discussion led by IDC’s Eric Burgener, followed by a presentation with Supermicro’s Paul McLeod, Director of System Product Management, on the topic of “Software-Defined Durability, Protection and Availability at Massive Scale,”  discussing some of the key lessons Frederik has learned in designing software systems for massive scale.   

Frederik is a pioneer of object storage, scalable systems, and software-defined architectures with 15 patents in the field. Originally, ActiveScale’s founding architect, Frederik now leads strategy, engineering, and development for ActiveScale Object Storage and cold storage products. 

To learn more about ActiveScale and the application of object storage to your environment, visit quantum.com/object-storage . 

To view our Partner blog, click here

Meet the New ActiveScale: Dynamic Capacity for Dynamic Growth – Take Your Data Storage from Terabytes to Exabytes

ActiveScale

Our world is being digitized at a dizzying rate. Unstructured data, such as entertainment videos, surveillance, weather, and geospatial data – is growing at up to 60% per year, and it is projected to comprise 80% of all data on the planet by 2025. Today, the amount stored is already approaching 150 zettabytes (IDC, 2020) while growing by the minute. This staggering growth is coming from a variety of sources, including video production, satellite imagery, telemetry, web-scale applications, gene sequencing, and IoT sensors, just to name a few.

Unstructured data sets are huge and often reach petabytes to even exabytes in size, making the classic NAS and SAN storage architectures unable to store and manage them. And, today’s data not only needs to be stored and protected; it also needs to be accessible by the people who need it, when they need it. Scientists, creative professionals, and business analysts each need immediate and ongoing access to their data from which to gain new insights and to monetize its underlying value.

UNLIMITED SCALABILITY

On June 24, Quantum made a significant announcement to address the demanding requirements to support unstructured data as we unveiled the latest generation of ActiveScale object storage software and systems – namely, ActiveScale 6.0 software and the new ActiveScale X200 platform. Together, they provide unlimited scalability in terms of capacity, object count, and performance, while ActiveScale’s unequalled data durability, system availability, and data security are not sacrificed.

NO REBALANCING REQUIRED

The ActiveScale 6.0 scale-out software architecture is key to achieving robust scalability. With ActiveScale, you can seamlessly expand your compute, networking, and storage resources to easily address increasing workloads. ActiveScale Dynamic Data Placement (DDP) incorporates advanced erasure encoding, data encryption, and real-time heuristics to optimally place data securely across the entire ActiveScale cluster. DDP not only guards against data loss, component, and site failures, but also optimizes total system throughput across the cluster. DDP essentially prevents the intrusive data rebalancing that plagues many other object storage systems and inhibits their scalability in real-life scenarios.

HIGH DENSITY INFRASTRUCTURE

The ActiveScale X200 object storage platform is a new converged system. It combines the latest generation of high-density, high-capacity servers with the latest ActiveScale software advancements. When compared with our previous generation X100, a 3-module X200 cluster fits in an equivalent data center rack, providing:

  • 78% greater storage density (14.6 PB raw)
  • Up to 7X greater sustained throughput (51 GB/sec)
  • 6X more objects (30B)

Consolidating this much capacity and computing power in the same floor space significantly reduces operational costs, while also delivering greater access and performance. Plus, by seamlessly adding additional X200 modules, capacity, performance, and object count can be expanded as data grows. (Note also that current customers benefit with the ability to expand their existing ActiveScale clusters with the X200 new platform)!

THE ACTIVESCALE PORTFOLIO

To put this in perspective with our expanded portfolio, ActiveScale can now be deployed for as small as a few 100 terabytes and as large as 100 exabytes and beyond, all within a single, easy-to-use system.

X200 blog

In other exciting news, in addition to ActiveScale X200 being available through Quantum and our stellar partner network, ActiveScale 6.0 software is now available through Supermicro and their resellers when bundled with qualified Supermicro servers. To learn more, click here .

MEET THE NEW ACTIVESCALE

Learn more about ActiveScale 6.0 and its rich feature set, plus the new X200 platform.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Take the Virtual DXi V5000 Software for a Test Drive

ActiveScale

The need for affordable high-capacity storage grows every year, which is why Quantum continues to produce DXi deduplication appliances and software with blazing fast ingest rates and huge capacities. But most large companies also have smaller sites that don’t need a monster storage solution of their own – and may even have excess virtual server and storage capacity sitting idle. For these sites – or any office with limited storage needs– Quantum offers virtual DXi deduplication appliances that you run on your own servers and scale to your own needs (for the soon-to-be-released V5000 that means from 20 TB to 5 PB of logical storage).

These virtual DXi appliances have all the main capabilities of their hardware relatives, including the ability to replicate data in either direction with other DXi appliances whether virtual or physical; or with AWS S3 Glacier Storage; or a Quantum ActiveScale server via S3 Cold Storage.

Try Out the Free V5000 Trial Version

Quantum just released the first test iteration of the V5000 – the V5000 Trial version — available for free here . This is a test system (the full GA version will be out this summer) that you can install and test out for up to 8 months and see how well this product can work for you. It’s not rated for production data and only scales to 1 TB of native storage, but you can use it to test out ways to install and utilize the V5000 full version coming in the summer. And the real shocker – when the full V5000 becomes available, the first 5 TB of storage you apply, which means up to 40 TB of logical data, is absolutely free without an expiration.

So, you can download the V5000 Trial version to test your hardware solution now and get a feel for the award-winning DXi technology in preparation for the true V5000 available this summer. The bottom line is that whatever your storage needs are, large or small, Quantum has a DXi answer.

About DXi Software

Quantum DXi software is fast and simple to download and deployable within minutes. For disaster recovery and ransomware protection, it includes the power and flexibility of target-based deduplication, instant encrypted replication that can send data to any other virtual or physical DXi appliances. The Secure Snapshot feature enables you to defend against cyberattacks, keeping data immutable. Quantum DXi integrates seamlessly into your environment and is compatible with leading backup software.

Try Out the V5000 Trial Version Now

Download the Trial Version Here

To view our Partner blog, click here