Overview
Coldago Research , an analyst firm that tracks the IT infrastructure market, recently published their annual Research Map for Object Storage . During the last year we innovated based on customer needs, and we’re very proud that Coldago recognizes that in our new placement, a significant gain over the past report. We’d like to share our insights on the progress.
Coldago Research Map 2019 for Object Storage map was published shortly after the ActiveScale acquisition from Western Digital. The report analyzes object storage vendors for “Execution and Capabilities” and “Vision and Strategy”. In the 2019 report, Quantum was positioned as a “Specialist” in the lower left portion of the map. The diagram below shows the 2020 report with an overlay of the previous position.
Now fast forward to 2020 for a success story. In the latest Coldago report, Quantum’s ActiveScale had the highest gain in both metrics, Execution/Capabilities and Vision/Strategy, of any vendor in the report. The product had a dramatic improvement in position, advancing over other vendors in the process through a series of continued innovation based on customer needs. Let’s take a deeper look at the foundation of ActiveScale and how we built on top of that with new features added over the last 12 months. Besides the product improvements, our gains reflect sales momentum as well. The ActiveScale feature set resonates with customers, and they’ve selected ActiveScale as their object storage system of choice.
Core architecture
The architecture of ActiveScale is built on a strong foundation including Dynamic Data Placement (DDP) and Dynamic Data Repair (DDR). These two pillars together provide a platform that is highly scalable, offers very high-performance with outstanding reliability, and is very easy to manage. Many of our customers have many PB’s and even EB’s of object storage with a single administrator. DDP provides the most efficient way to store and protect objects on disk, all in a GEO-protected manner. For a deeper dive, check out this tech talk on how it works, it’s quite interesting. DDP tracks all the metadata on flash-based media for maximum performance yet places the massive amount of data on lower cost spinning disk drives. This combination yields the highest performance at the lowest possible cost. DDR constantly monitors and protects data, predictively monitoring the system to reduce administrative time and maximize availability.
Product Updates
Over the last 12 months, the engineering team has been hard at work delivering many new features to add even more capabilities. Here’s just a partial list:
- Small file optimization – This new feature aggregates small files into a large object prior to erasure encoding. This results in a much more efficient utilization of capacity and better overall performance for small object transactions.
- Smaller, more affordable configurations – ActiveScale now comes in a smaller, three-node configuration. With this entry-level option, a company can benefit from the management, protection, and preservation capabilities of ActiveScale in a smaller more compact system, rather than waiting until they have a large-scale operation.
- Object lock for data immutability – Object Lock protects data from malicious acts such as data deletion, relocation, and ransomware. Once immutability is set on an object or a bucket it cannot be modified until the policy expires.
Future looks bright
Coldago’s report showing Quantum’s improvement highlights the dramatic progress in the ActiveScale product line. We knew the product was a winner back in 2020, and with the continuous improvements made over the last year, analysts and customers alike are recognizing the results. We’re not stopping there; we have a great release plan in place for the coming year. Stay tuned – we’ll let our customers and analysts know what we’re planning and look forward to continued recognition.