Quantum Adds AWS as Archive Storage Tier

Storage solutions vendor Quantum Corp has added cloud archiving and backup on Amazon Web Services as an option, making the public cloud a possible storage tier for its StorNext data management platform.

Quantum provides primary file storage, data protection, and archiving tailored to specific industries, such as media and entertainment or geospacial imaging. It's scale-out storage and application-based workflows for large datasets and/or high-performance requirements.

Storage tiering means using the right kind of storage for the right kind of needs. Adding AWS as a disaster recovery and archival tier shifts the capital expense of buying storage capacity to operational expense of renting it from the cloud provider.

A media company, for example, needs specific workflows to work with huge amounts of streaming-type data, such as for editing a movie or formatting a film for multiple formats. They need high data throughput, high performance and a very structured workflow. When the work is done, however, there is no need to store the finished product on expensive high-performance storage systems. A surveillance company records a ton of video but doesn’t necessarily watch all of that video.

“For each of these workflows, there’s an appropriate storage tier,” said Dave Fredrick, Quantum’s senior director of product marketing. “For acquisition and editing, they need the fastest storage available to allow editors to look simultaneously. Customers pay a premium price to get that kind of performance. But when they get to preservation stage, they want a low cost.”

Setting up AWS as a cloud archiving tier on their own would mean building their own data protection and workflows from scratch to shape AWS for their needs. Quantum is offering to do the heavy lifting for them.

“Getting to the cloud is not as easy as customers think," said Fredrick. "A user-friendly ‘Dropbox experience’ is not at all what happens.”

Two of the company’s new cloud products, Q-Cloud Archive and Q-Cloud Vault, are focused on scale-out storage and managed through its StorNext file system and archiving platform.

Stornext is for high streaming file performance. It is a file system that creates a global namespace that traverses disparate storage resources (primary, extended, tape, and now also cloud).

Stornext keeps track of the original file in the original location, has a policy engine to create business rules and take advantage of storage tiering, and is multi-protocol (no need to setup transfers or gateways).