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Re-Imagining Quantum’s Portfolio for Managing Unstructured Data

ActiveScale

This week, we made a significant announcement, introducing an expanded portfolio focused on classifying, managing, and protecting unstructured data across its lifecycle. The new products we introduced represent another significant step in our vision to lead in video and unstructured data solutions and represent a key shift in focus from ‘storing’ data to ‘managing’ data. 

Accelerating Data Growth, Data Movement, and Use of Hybrid- and Multi-Cloud

Our customers are dealing with massive unstructured data sprawl – video, digital images, and other forms of unstructured data are growing by 30-60% per year. Many of our customers have millions or billions of files and lack visibility into what they have, and where it lives. This lack of visibility combined with the velocity of data growth is putting pressure on infrastructure costs and forcing companies to rethink infrastructure designs. 

At the same time, the COVID pandemic has resulted in permanent changes to the workforce, driving more data movement (between edge / core / cloud), and an acceleration in the adoption of hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud. The emergence of AI and machine learning techniques provide new tools to leverage this data, and is also driving new lifecycle and ‘workflow’ requirements for this data, including a desire to preserve and protect this data and keep it accessible for decades. 

All of this adds up to what we see as the key challenge facing our customers in this decade – how to unlock business value out of all of this data, and manage this data across the entire multi-decade lifecycle of this data.

Manage Unstructured Data, Across Any Workload, End-to-End with Quantum

Our expanded portfolio can help our customers tackle this challenge, starting with new ways to classify and manage data across its lifecycle, for any workload, end-to-end. This expanded portfolio is depicted and summarized below:

atfs graphic

The new announcements include:

  • New ways to visualize, automate, and purposefully place data, with Quantum’s All-Terrain File System (ATFS) , a next-gen storage platform targeted at the NAS market. 
  • StorNext 7 :  The latest version of Quantum’s high-performance file system, for high throughput low-latency workloads. StorNext 7 introduces new features like file system pools that optimize the use of NVMe for production storage, as well as new ways to program and manage the file system.
  • An expanded ActiveScale object storage portfolio , including a new 3-node object storage system, object lock to protect against ransomware, and small object aggregation to improve the performance of small objects.

Lastly, all of these new offerings are available on a capacity basis, with new all-inclusive software licensing that aligns our licensing with the value we are delivering to customers. 

We look forward to engaging with customers and partners on this expanded portfolio – to learn more, please register for our VirtualQ I Transform event where we will be showcasing all of these new solutions.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Is STaaS Right for You?

Archive Storage

For companies that increasingly view storage as a vital utility, rather than as a capability that they want to cultivate and staff, Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS ) is becoming an increasingly attractive option. With the advent of cloud computing, IT departments started getting comfortable with software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service. With Amazon S3, storage-as-a-service entered the mainstream. STaaS is essentially a cloud-like storage resource, implemented as an on-premises service providing immediacy, scalability, and pay-per-use flexibility, minus the security and performance variability issues that keep enterprise users up at night.

STaaS offers some compelling benefits . End users turning
to STaaS are drawn by the ability to reduce operational and administrative
costs, eliminate unplanned capital expenditures and major upgrades, improve
control and security with on-prem infrastructure, and achieve greater
performance with less downtime.

IT departments making their first steps into the realm of
StaaS often begin with a daunting list of questions to address as they begin to
sort through basic questions of what kind of storage they require.  How much do they value security, service, and
support? How do they manage and control their environments? What is the true
value of an SLA?

Surveying the Enterprise IT Community about STaaS

John Webster, senior analyst with Evaluator Group, decided
it was time to take the temperature of the end-user community considering STaaS.
Webster surveyed 249 enterprise IT end users and conducted extensive interviews
to understand the evolving attitudes toward STaaS.

The results are
revealing. Some of the interviewees spoke glowingly of the benefits they have
seen. One noted, “Switching over to STaaS has allowed us to lifecycle our aging
storage fleet without the large CAPEX layout that would be required if we were
to purchase the storage infrastructure. We will also be getting a significant
performance uplift from the new storage hardware.”

Not surprisingly, compatibility,
security, and support are all top concerns for end users as follows:

  • 73% of those surveyed required compatibility
    with their existing IT environment. Customers
    want a STaaS vendor to be the single, consolidated source for support and
    maintenance.
  • 65% of respondents
    indicated that they want the STaaS vender to be the single source of support
    and maintenance even if the infrastructure is sourced from different suppliers.

In the area of management and control of a STaaS
environment, just 22% of survey respondents want the vendor to manage every
aspect of their STaaS environment. 11% prefer to do it all themselves. Most
want something in between.

“What I could allow the vendor to
manage and control depends on what they own. There are a lot of moving pieces
in an IT environment,” the CIO of a manufacturing firm noted. “The storage
vendor could tweak something, which causes problems upstream and we’re left
trying to figure out what changed. One of the things I hate is when vendors say
it’s not their problem or they didn’t do that. They would have to be
accountable and we would have to know what they are doing.”

Download STaas eBook

Webster’s eBook, “Storage-as-a-Service Comes of Age – A Study of
Enterprise User Perceptions and Requirements,” is now available to download for
anyone eager to learn more.

To view our Partner blog, click here

The “Chill Factor” in a Secured Backup and Archive Solution

air-gap

The topic of data growth and security continues to be a challenge for many
organizations. The question to “air-gap” or not to “air-gap” is consistently
being posed across all industries as they think about a solid backup and
archive strategy. When it comes to how and where to invest, air-gapping becomes
the last item on the checklist, and understandably so. Data keeps growing and
while budgets may increase slightly, IT resources are forecasted to stay flat,
according to IDC. With so many avant-garde technologies out there, it seems
tape is shrinking in its usage. However, tape’s unique ability (despite its
advanced age) to morph into a sustainably green, secure, and very
cost-effective alternative to other backup and archive solutions allows it to
stay relevant – even over cloud alternatives. I’d say a rebound could be on the
horizon…

So, what is the chill factor?

As in weather, the wind chill will determine how cold it actually feels on
your skin when the wind is factored in. Likewise, organizations today must
understand their data to determine how hot or cold it is to leverage the
appropriate storage solution that is efficient yet cost effective. Much of the
data in more expensive primary storage is cold. Cold data is simply
infrequently used data. IDC estimates that about 40% of the 7.5 ZB of data will
be commercially related and of that, about 60% will be cold
data or data with expected retrieval of greater than 30 days. This data is a
perfect candidate for tape storage in your data center or in the cloud. And
hey, cold storage doesn’t require a lot of power and cooling.

Security

Tape continues to be the de facto to secure your cold storage/long-term
data. Fact is, the physical air-gap between tapes and the network simply does
not allow malware/ransomware or hackers to break through to reach offline data.
The goal of these evil agents is to destabilize and destroy the ability to
self-recover, and then demand a ransom. We’ve heard many stories and companies
go out of business because of the vulnerability of keeping all data online.
While any online data can be destroyed by an eventual hacker, the data stored
securely on tape is untouched with its integrity intact.

Considering both costs and damage created by these attacks, plus the
astronomical hit on your resources and valuable time that could be spent on
managing critical data, there are more than enough reasons to create the best
protection of your critical data on tape. Sure, you can keep cold data on hot
disk, but the best approach is to tier it off to the most cost-effective
alternative – tape. That’s why we highly recommend the 3-2-1-1 approach to
protection. At the end of the day, what matters is “are you able to recover?”.
If your data is chilled, there is no reason to tremble.

Economics

Determining the value of your data will help you understand the eventual
storage solution required. Never underestimate the value of your historical
data. We live in a world where our “always online” way of life opens the
door to a barrage of threats. The good news is, economics is on your side. Tape
is still the lowest cost for storage available today, and the foreseeable
future. At less than $50/TB, as long as data is preserved on tape, it will give
you the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).

Taking these factors into consideration will bring a tiering approach to
your backup and archive strategy and enable the proper protection approach for
the type of data in need of saving, cooling, and securing.

To view our Partner blog, click here