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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:

The post The Future of Cold Storage is Here – Introducing ActiveScale Cold Storage and Quantum Object Storage Services appeared first on Quantum Blog .

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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

Efficiency or Else…

bottleneck

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe used the phrase “less is
more” to describe the minimalist aesthetic of his work.  While I find minimalism thought-provoking,
I’m a moderate in most things and an unrepentant maximalist when it comes to
dessert.

Technology vendors and consumers relate to tech products
like I relate to dessert.  It’s all about
more.  Bigger screens, faster CPUs, higher
resolutions, more features.  Once the
basics are commoditized, adding features is about the only way for vendors to
differentiate, so that’s what they do.

Data storage is not immune to this condition.  Formerly bare-bones storage arrays have been
larded up with features.  Snapshots,
tiering, deduplication, compression, clones, replication, scrubbing, analytics
and all the other stuff can be useful.  But
there is a cost that has long been hidden.

price tag

Modern CPUs are so fast that they can submit a read and have
time to walk to Starbucks for a latte before the storage responds.  With traditional hard drives most of this
delay is due to rotational latency.  With
SAS SSDs it’s the single-queue inefficiency of SCSI.  The storage is the bottleneck.  As a result there’s lots of time to run
feature software on the array, and not a lot of pressure for that software to
be efficient.

Now with NVMe, suddenly the storage is orders of magnitude
faster, and the CPU is in much higher demand. 
The weight of all those features becomes apparent in the form of lower
performance.  Marc Staimer of Dragon
Slayer Consulting refers to this as the “CPU
chokepoint .”  He notes that
you can improve performance by throwing more CPU at the problem, but that there
are seriously diminishing marginal returns. 
Storage class memory (SCM) is going to make the situation even worse,
and not even Gordon Moore can
save us this time.  The piper is here
with his hand out.

clock

To maximize the potential of NVMe storage and the bang for
the customer’s buck, everything about the system design, especially the storage
software, must be efficient.  Generating
big numbers is important, but if it takes obscene core counts to get there your
product will cost too much.

When Quantum designed our F-Series NVMe storage array ,
efficiency was top of mind.  We didn’t
just take some array architecture designed for general-purpose IT and stuff in
NVMe drives.  We carefully crafted a
hardware and software system that provides over 24GB/s of throughput in 2U, with
low latency to support multiple streams of 4K and 8K editing and playout
without dropping frames.  A single 2U
appliance can do the same job as a full rack or two of legacy storage,
providing space efficiency as well.  And F-Series
is cost-efficient, providing a surprising amount of performance per dollar.

Quantum’s most demanding customers have always been in film, where ever-escalating image quality demands huge streaming performance.  F-Series was designed for customers like these, who don’t want or need storage arrays with deduplication, cup holders, or power seats.  Customers who understand that sometimes less is more.  Those who have tried it have been supremely impressed, so I know we got it right.  Give us a shout if you want to see how efficient high-performance NVMe storage can be.  And while you’re at it cut me a piece of that cake – a big one with lots of frosting.

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Tape Finds New Uses While Disk Suffers

CMMA Blog

tape storageMy thanks to Christophe Bertrand, a Senior Analyst at ESG, for his recent video which includes some interesting factoids from ESG’s 2018 Data Protection Landscape survey. The survey echoes my own observations as a member of organizations that care about such things, including the LTO Consortium, the Active Archive Alliance, and Quantum’s product marketing and product management team.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Flash Around the Globe: Four Key Takeaways & New Results from Quantum Surveys

flash

Flash storage around the globeEarlier this year we shared findings from a large-scale survey of North American video professionals about their use of flash-based storage. The highlights? Many organizations have already implemented flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) into their storage environment as a way to boost performance for key video workflows—and additional organizations are planning to move to flash soon.

To view our Partner blog, click here