Quantum Expands Data Management Portfolio for Unstructured Data

Quantum on Tuesday expanded its portfolio for unstructured data. Three new offers expand capabilities for managing and protecting unstructured data across the entire data life cycle.

Included in the announcement are Quantum ATFS, Quantum StorNext 7 File System and Quantum ActiveScale Object Store. The company also is changing its software licensing model, offering it on a capacity basis for all new offerings.

Quantum’s Eric Bassier

“We’re enhancing our highest performance data platform, StorNext. We’re enhancing our most resilient data platform, ActiveScale. And we’re introducing an all-new platform, ATFS, that opens up a new set of opportunities for us and for our partners,” said Eric Bassier, senior director of marketing at Quantum. “We’re also better aligning how we sell our products with the customer value they deliver. I think that’s going to give a better experience for our partners and more opportunity for them as well.”

Deep Dive

Quantum All-Terrain File System (ATFS) is targeted at the general purpose NAS market to give customers new ways to visualize, automate and place data. It’s a next-generation software platform with integrated data classification. The next-generation architecture is designed for any storage media, scale to billions of files, up to 12GBs/performance and to seamlessly extend to the cloud.

The latest version of Quantum’s high-performance file system is Quantum StorNext 7. It provides new ways to optimize NVMe storage for high throughput and low latency workloads. The new version introduces file system pools to improve performance and efficiency. Also, client-side access controls improve security. Customers also get a new and simplified user interface and expanded web services APIs.

The vendor also expanded its object storage portfolio, ActiveScale, with a new entry level model — ActiveScale P100E3. This latest offer protects data against ransomware and improves performance. The smaller capacity model is a three-node object storage system. It has new features such as object lock to protect critical data, which prevents someone from deleting or modifying it for a specified period of time. And, small object aggregation is a new feature that improves system performance.

“We’ve had challenges to compete in the low end of the market because we haven’t had an offer like this. But this will open up low end of the object storage market for us and for our partners,” said Bassier.

Unstructured Data Sprawl

Business customers are dealing with massive unstructured data sprawl, which is growing by 30-60% per year.

“Especially with COVID-19, there’s more data movement happening because workforces are distributed and companies are trying to figure out how they get this data where it needs to be,” said Bassier. “Some of the macro trends are playing into our product strategy. Now we can really start to manage data across its life cycle more than just store it and protect it.”