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Beefing Up the Mid-Range – Introducing the ActiveScale P200 Platform

ActiveScale

With the addition of the new mid-range ActiveScale P200, we have completed the platform refresh across the entire ActiveScale portfolio, providing significantly enhanced performance and density across all price points. To meet the increasing need for object storage, ActiveScale cost-effectively scales from terabytes to exabytes and is the only object storage platform architected for both active and cold data.

p200
The ActiveScale P200 Object Storage Platform

The P200 – Start Small, Grow Big

The P200 is our new mid-range solution, based on a simple, converged architecture that consolidates computing, networking, and storage into a simple 3U building block for easy deployment and expansion. The ActiveScale P200 easily grows by adding multiple P200s together for unlimited scalability of capacity, performance, and object count to start small and grow big. Even as a 3U 3-node configuration, the P200 packs a lot of power in a dense package. Compared to the ActiveScale P100, on a per rack basis, the P200 provides:

  • 1.9X more capacity
  • 2.4X greater PUT performance
  • 2.7X greater GET performance
  • 6.25X more objects

In a 36U rack, a 12-node P200 scale-out cluster packs a lot of punch:

  • 7.8 petabytes of Active Class storage
  • 15 billion objects
  • Measured performance up to 37.8 GB/sec GETs and 31.9 GB/sec PUTs

The P200 replaces the P100 in the ActiveScale product line. But rest assured, no man (or node) gets left behind. Existing P100 customers preserve their pre-existing investment in P100s with the ability to expand their P100 clusters with P200 platforms, not only maximizing their investments in P100, but also capitalizing on new levels of capability and density of the P200.

The Foundation for the Next Evolution in Object Storage

In addition to being a powerful platform for any object storage need, the P200 is an ideal choice upon which to build your unstructured data management strategy. Undoubtedly, data is well recognized today as a strategic asset. Entire industries are digitally transforming with the opportunity to extract significant value from a wide variety of digital data sources. Whether you are producing petabytes of data through gene sequencing, satellites, user activities, or market data, the need to store, analyze, protect, and archive, more and more data is growing unabated.

As the only object storage platform that supports Active and Cold Storage Classes, the P200 allows you to keep more data at lower cost and access that data whenever you need to without expensive fees or complex recovery procedures.

ActiveScale P200 3GEO with Active and Cold Data

3geo
Self-protecting and disaster-tolerant expansion at up to 80% less cost using ActiveScale Cold Storage

The requirements for the next generation of massive data stores are not only that they be self-protecting and disaster-tolerant, but also that they scale cost-effectively. P200 meets this need as a powerful disaster-tolerant solution through its ability to deploy across multiple data centers with full redundancy and non-stop access even in the case of a site failure. Using three P200s, a petabyte scale cluster can be geospread across three data centers.

As data needs grow, requirements may be met by adding P200’s for active data. But moreover, as content ages, many organizations are best served by adding cold data resources at lower cost, by deploying ActiveScale cold storage , based on Two Dimensional Erasure Coding (2D EC) and the Quantum RAIL architecture. By adding just one tape library at each site, long term cold storage costs can be reduced by up to 80%.

A Powerful Platform Portfolio

The addition of the ActiveScale P200 platform completes an aggressive plan to upgrade the entire ActiveScale portfolio based on a common converged architecture. With scalability from terabytes to exabytes, ActiveScale meets the need for simple, secure, protected data platforms for backup, recovery, and content management in small commercial enterprises to the unstructured data needs of the most demanding and complex IT environments. ActiveScale provides scalable, cost effective, no compromise solutions to meet the growing demand to extract more value from these growing data stores.

ActiveScale Object Storage Platform Portfolio

ASCS Portfolio

For more information, you can download the ActiveScale datasheet here .  

The post Beefing Up the Mid-Range – Introducing the ActiveScale P200 Platform appeared first on Quantum Blog .

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Deduplication Storage for Protecting and Recovering Your Data: Not Just for Big Corporations

CMMA Blog

Data deduplication represents an almost $4.5 Billion growing market. When Quantum acquired the first patent on variable-length deduplication in 2006, it was the latest and greatest technology and something only corporate giants could afford. But a decade and a half later, it no longer gets a lot of press or attention, but it’s still necessary and still widely used by the largest companies on the planet.

Deduplication is a no brainer: Why buy 20 disks when you could buy 1? It saves on disk, server capacity, power usage, space – everything. And while deduplication used to be bleeding edge technology only affordable to big corporations, it’s now a mature technology available to any size company – or individual by download. So once again, who wouldn’t want to buy less disk and spend less money? With corporate quality backup products and storage now available for free, is there any excuse not to protect your systems?

You know you must back up your data. And the question is not whether you should deduplicate backups, but rather how. Individual backup products often offer deduplication, but they may charge for it and only deduplicate their own data – and in a much less efficient way than appliances like Quantum’s DXi. The DXi appliance uses a more efficient “variable length” deduplication algorithm and is a storehouse for all kinds of data from any source with all of it deduplicated together. Usually at a 20:1 or greater ratio (deduplication rates vary, but most customers see between 10:1 and 30:1 rates).

New Virtual DXi V5000 Backup Appliance

The new DXi V5000, along with the DXi V5000 Community Edition , make it easier than ever to download and use Quantum DXi deduplication technology. This new offering is ideally suited for data protection at remote sites, edge environments, and for small businesses looking to efficiently back up and protect their critical data. The DXi V5000 has the same features and capabilities of a physical DXi appliance, deployed as a virtual machine.  A common use case is using the DXi V5000 as a virtual backup appliance at a remote site, then replicating deduplicated data to a core data center so that organizations can protect their data across sites, and between edge and core. In addition, along with the DXi V5000, we also announced the DXi V5000 Community Edition.

Announcing DXi V5000 Community Edition with 5 TB of Free Storage

As part of the rollout of the DXi V5000 – the newest member of the 15-year-old DXi family – Quantum is offering a free-forever virtual DXi to anyone. All you need is basic computer hardware with 1 – 5 TB of disk and Quantum will provide the software to store data for no charge. If you want to upgrade, you can buy a license to extend your DXi to 256 TB of storage and add on top-quality Quantum support.

DXi V5000 Download Requirements

To download and use the virtual DXi, all you need is an X86-64 computer with 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of memory, and anywhere from 200 GB to 5.1 TB of disk (scale it to the disk however you want and increase capacity later when you need it). DXi is downloadable as a .iso or a .ova file, and easily installs in Hyper-V, VMware or KVM. Linux with KVM is a good option and is both downloadable and free (never used Linux? There are plenty of YouTube videos to guide you through the install and configuration process). 

Once you get your DXi V5000 up and running, you have more than just a deduplicating storage device, you have a full powered DXi. You can setup other V5000s and replicate between them with intelligent, secure replication that only transfers changed data – saving on bandwidth. You can use the features of DXi to secure backups against ransomware, keep point-in-time snapshot images of data without wasting disk space, and restore anything at any time – as easy as if you just copied to a big NAS system.

And you can use a DXi with Windows Backup and Restore (free on any Windows system) or Veeam’s “Free Forever for 10 workloads” community version and you’ve got a corporate level backup system – for free. If you already use a backup technology like NetBackup or Veeam, DXi is integrated to work with all the major backup products. And all DXi features are included with the Community Edition of the DXi V5000.

Get Started: Download the DXi V5000 Community Edition

Here are some links to get you started. Quantum’s DXi V5000 Community Edition is available from here . Community support, videos on install and configuration, and other helpful subjects are available in Quantum’s ForumV Community page.

So, whether you manage a big or small computer environment, can you afford not to use professional-level products like these to protect your data?

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Two Reasons that Tape Has a Bright Future Heading into 2022 and Beyond

Archive

There were two pieces of recent news about tape storage which prove that tape is alive and well, and these articles highlight two reasons why tape has a bright future in 2022 and beyond. 

Reason # 1:  There are Excellent Use Cases for Tape for Long Term Data Archiving and as part of Cyber-Resilient Infrastructures

The first news is a report published in Enterprise Storage Forum:  The Tape Storage Market in 2022 .  This report reinforces why tape is more relevant than ever in 2022, and why enterprises and large cloud providers continue to turn to tape because of its unique benefits.  In short:

  • Tape has emerged as a key technology for long term data archiving and cold data storage.  It can reliably store data for decades, and since most of the data being generated will be “cold” data – meaning inactive data that must be kept for a long time – tape is an ideal storage solution to help large enterprises manage costs and preserve access to this valuable inactive data. 
  • Tape is green.  Although this is one of the benefits of tape for long term data archiving, it deserves its own call out.  Tape consumes about 1/5th the power and cooling of HDD technology, and for any organization archiving data for many years, let alone decades, the costs of this add up.  Power and cooling costs are rising, particularly in large metro areas, and many organizations are also considering the large environmental impact of powering large data centers.  An infrastructure strategy that incorporates tape can address these issues.
  • Tape is Secure.  With the rise in ransomware and cyber-threats, it is no surprise that many organizations that have moved away from tape are now coming back.  Keeping a backup copy, or archive copy of critical data on tape provides a secure location to recover from in the event of a ransomware attack.  More on that below…

Reason # 2:  There is plenty of opportunity for innovation in tape

The second bit of news is that a Quantum tape solution, Ransom Block , has been named one of the 10 Coolest Data Storage Products of 2021 by CRN . 

Wait…what???  Tape is one of the coolest products in 2021???

You bet.  Quantum Scalar Ransom Block is an industry-first and helps to address one of the most pressing challenges facing enterprises today – how to build cyber-resilient infrastructure.  Ransom Block is the first solution to create a physical block between data tapes and the tape robotic system, providing the strongest air-gap solution possible.  So although tape storage systems are inherently more secure than HDD or SSD storage systems, only Quantum tape libraries offer a full suite of features for cyber-protection and cyber-resilience.  You can learn more about these features and how they are part of a comprehensive security framework here . 

Quantum also introduced another breakthrough innovation earlier this year with ActiveScale Cold Storage .  This is a new class of storage for ActiveScale systems that uses tape as the underlying storage medium.  So users get a true object storage system, using S3 Standard and S3 Glacier API sets, and can now build an object store using any amount of HDD and tape storage, based on their needs.  The entire solution can be deployed as-a-Service.

So the future for tape is bright, and Quantum is going to continue to innovate and lead in the use of tape for long term data archiving and cyber-resilient infrastructures. 

The post Two Reasons that Tape Has a Bright Future Heading into 2022 and Beyond appeared first on Quantum Blog .

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AWS Outposts Meets ActiveScale Object Storage

ActiveScale

Today is another great day for ActiveScale Object Storage . We are pleased to announce that ActiveScale is now AWS Outposts Ready .  This designation, part of the AWS Service Ready program, validates ActiveScale object storage systems in AWS Outposts deployments to provide Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) compliant services for AWS services running within an AWS Outposts environment. 

WHAT AND WHY AWS OUTPOSTS? 

AWS Outposts is a service offering first introduced in 2019 that offers AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools within your own datacenter. In effect, the AWS cloud comes to you,- through a fully configured, rack-based system environment deployed in your own data center, co-location facility, or hosted IT environment. Consistent with AWS services in the AWS cloud, and as trending in the industry today across multiple platform vendors, AWS Outposts is sold and managed by AWS as a fully managed service.  

AWS Outposts provides a hybrid cloud solution that is fully compatible and integrates with your IT resources deployed in the AWS cloud. As an on-premises solution, AWS Outposts is particularly well suited for workloads that require: 

  • low latency access to on-premises systems,  
  • local data processing due to dependencies on in-house resources or constraints, or 
  • data residency in a specific geography or security domain. 

WHY ACTIVESCALE AND QUANTUM OBJECT STORAGE SERVICES 

ActiveScale is an ideal solution for AWS Outposts as it provides industry-leading scalability, data durability, and total cost of ownership (TCO), enabled by its unique ability to cost-effectively manage both active and cold data. ActiveScale Dynamic Data Placement (DDP) incorporates advanced erasure coding and real-time algorithms to optimally place data securely across the entire ActiveScale system. DDP not only guards against data loss, component, and site failures, but also optimizes system performance. 

THE EMERGENCE OF THE AGILE DATA CENTER 

The increasing adoption of AWS Outposts, and recent designation of ActiveScale as an AWS Outposts Ready solution, reflect growing interest by enterprises and cloud services providers alike to adopt hybrid cloud and as-a-Service data center strategies as they evolve their infrastructures into the future. Large organizations are choosing as-a-Service solutions for their financial flexibility, agility, and simple consumption models. As another data point, note that analyst firm, IDC, predicts that Data-Center-Infrastructure-as-a-Service (DCIaaS) revenues will grow from $138M in 2020 to a whopping $14B in 2025 at a growth rate of 151.8% annually.1  Service offerings from major IT system suppliers, such as HPE Greenlake and Dell Technologies Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service, also reflect this trend.  

The growing demand for on-premises data center services is consistent with Quantum’s own aggressive development of Quantum-as-a-Service solutions, for example, with our recent introduction of Quantum Object Storage Services  (QOSS). Based on ActiveScale platforms, Quantum Object Storage Services provide affordable, scalable on-prem private cloud storage services for both active and archived data sets. In this deployment scenario, Quantum owns, installs, manages, maintains, and monitors your private ActiveScale infrastructure, delivered as-a-Service, backed by Quantum expertise, service delivery tools, and AIOps-driven analytics and monitoring. Scalable from petabytes to exabytes, QOSS meets the growing demands of large enterprises, government agencies, cloud service providers and research organizations for more dynamic and flexible IT consumption models. 

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Meet Me in St. Louis – For an HPC, AI, and Analytics Extravaganza

ActiveScale

Here at Quantum, we are excited to finally be on the road again. Next stop – St. Louis! Next week, SC21 , the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, is being held at America’s Center in downtown St Louis.

sc21 1

A HISTORY OF INNOVATION

This event has a rich history of showcasing technical innovation in high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure and applications from across a broad spectrum of universities, supercomputing centers, national labs, and industrial research centers.

For Quantum, a couple of themes particularly resonate:

  • Managing data growth. The ongoing challenge of ingesting, analyzing, and managing massive data sets across their data lifecycle.
  • Cold data that’s not so cold. The desire to save more data from more sources, plus the need for easy and affordable access to that data now, and long into the future, for continued and periodic computational analysis and recalibration of deep learning models.

At the show, we will be highlighting our recent updates to the ActiveScale object storage platform , industry-leading security features of Scalar tape archive solutions , and StorNext NVMe, RDMA and tiered storage technologies. Most of all, we are excited to promote the success of our customers building state-of-the-art capabilities with Quantum products and solutions (for example, Genomics England ).

PLUS, SOME FUN AND GAMES

sc21b 1

We are also here to enjoy some fun and games. In addition to sponsoring the Petaflop , we are delighted to be co-hosting a social get together with our tech partner, Weka , to connect with our customers and the HPC community at large, and celebrate our high performance, massive scale joint storage solutions for HPC, Genomics, and AI . You don’t need to be Irish to get in ( ;o) ), but you do need to stop by the Quantum booth #918 or Weka booth #927 to claim your ticket!

We hope to see you there!

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The Future of Cold Storage is Here – Introducing ActiveScale Cold Storage and Quantum Object Storage Services

ActiveScale

Over the past several years, Quantum has quietly become the leading provider of cold storage infrastructure to the world’s largest cloud providers. Through these efforts, we’ve learned a lot about building massive, scalable cloud storage infrastructure that is easy to use and easy to manage. With this experience, and with several pioneering innovations, we are pleased to offer a breakthrough solution for helping large enterprises, research organizations, and web-scale companies easily manage and master the massive data growth with which they too are challenged.

The Challenge

With the digital transformation of nearly everything , organizations are experiencing explosive data growth. This data is mostly unstructured and mostly cold – inactive data that is accessed infrequently. Yet, it contains immense value and has the potential for future enrichment, monetization, and re-use, so it must be securely protected and remain accessible, for years, decades, and often indefinitely. Solutions today are limited and expensive – either give up control of your data to a public cloud provider and be taxed each time you access your own data, or alternatively, build costly file and object storage systems in house.

With Quantum, the future of cold storage is here.

S3 Glacier Class Storage for the Data Center

With today’s announcement of ActiveScale Cold Storage, we are introducing a new class of storage that combines advanced object store software with hyperscale tape technology to provide the industry’s most affordable, durable, and accessible cold storage archiving solution.

And based on these technologies, we are also announcing Quantum Object Storage Services, the industry’s only as-a-Service solution for both active and cold data archiving, deployable wherever your data lives – whether that’s in your in-house data center, colocation facility, or hosted IT environment.

cold storage 1

Breakthrough Innovations

These new offerings are made possible by Quantum’s innovations – combined to form the industry’s most advanced cold storage archive with unmatched levels of performance, durability, and storage efficiency.

  1. ActiveScale Object Storage is the first and only object storage platform architected for both active and cold data, providing seamless, secure storage management and high-performance access to massive data sets.
  2. ActiveScale Cold Storage is built on Quantum’s hyperscale RAIL architecture. (That’s short for Redundant Array of Independent Libraries). A RAIL architecture, built with Quantum Scalar Tape Libraries , provides unlimited, incremental scalability, and linear performance gains, plus increased availability and serviceability. In total, RAIL enables a new level of accessibility to tape-based data.
  3. Further, ActiveScale patent-pending two-dimensional erasure coding (2D EC) software encodes data within and across tapes, tape drives, libraries, and geo-dispersed data centers, simultaneously providing industry-leading data access performance, durability, and storage efficiency.

Offered as a Fully Managed Service

Increasingly, large organizations are choosing as-a-Service solutions for their financial flexibility, agility, and simple consumption models. Quantum is enabling these Active and Cold Data solutions as fully managed, as-a-Service offerings, with a simple, competitive, two-tiered pricing model that is simple to purchase, simple to plan for, and with no data access fees. With our solution, Quantum owns, installs, manages, maintains, and monitors your private Quantum cloud storage infrastructure, delivered as-a-Service, backed by Quantum expertise, service delivery tools, and AIOps-driven analytics and monitoring.

cold storage 2

What Does This All Mean?

In total, these offerings provide:

  • Easy, affordable accessibility of S3 and S3 Glacier Class storage in the data center of your choice.
  • Unlimited scalability of both active and cold data sets.
  • The ability to restore objects from cold storage to active storage in minutes.
  • 100x to 1Mx greater durability, and up to 40% better storage efficiency, than two copy archive solutions.
  • Reduced cold storage costs by up to 80% compared to all-disk solutions.
  • 30+% savings relative to public cloud cold storage services.
  • Outsourced storage operations and simpler data management without access fees.

Up until now, organizations have been limited in their ability to affordably manage and store the massive amounts of data that they are collecting today (up to 98% of today’s data gets thrown away and 60% of data that is stored is cold). These offerings now provide a new level of capability not only to store these growing data sets, but also to:  

  • Securely maintain in-house control of these assets
  • Easily access this data to unlock and enrich its value
  • Be confident in its preservation and protection over the coming years and decades

To Learn More

For more information on these new breakthrough innovations and offerings, please go to these additional resources:

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