Quantum Wants Data Archiving to Transcend Media, Location

Quantum Corp. announced a pair of partnerships with Artico through which it will offer a network attached storage appliance that can store data locally on disk and tape and in the cloud along with a NAS data archiving appliance that can backup and archive data using Arkivio Autostor software from Rocket Software.

In addition, Quantum announced that it is making a version of its Lattus object storage system that can be configured with 6TB drives.

Mark Pastor, product marketing manager for archive solutions for Quantum, says that when it comes to data protection these days, IT organizations have more options than ever inside and out of the cloud.

The Artico appliance comes with a cloud gateway capability that makes it simpler to move data between local storage systems and the cloud using StorNext 5 data management software to apply policies concerning when that data should be moved.

Meanwhile, the Arkivio software gives customers the ability to use the same data protection appliance for both backup and data archiving.

Collectively, Pastor says, Quantum now provides a much broader spectrum of data protection options that depending on the nature of the data being stored will be applied differently.

Tape is still the lowest-cost medium for data archiving, but some organizations may still opt to archive data in the cloud, says Pastor. At the same time, other organizations want to be able to backup and archive data using the same appliance at different times of the day.

Regardless of the approach, Pastor says, growth of unstructured data is forcing organizations to rethink their data protection strategies. In fact, disk systems are having a hard time handing the load.

“The fact is that disk-based systems are struggling with all the data,” says Pastor. “We like to think we’re entering a third generation of data protection that is going to be more intelligent.”

Rather than trying to force organizations into a single approach to protecting data, Quantum, via these partnerships, is giving customers more flexibility to determine the data protection media that best suit their individual requirements.

The Arkivio software is also designed to make it simpler to access data once it is archived. Rather than treating that data as cold storage, Pastor says, the software essentially creates a live archive of data stored in its native format that IT organizations can more readily access.

Once a fairly simple task, data protection has become more complicated to manage thanks to increased regulations and the number of options that are available for storing data. As tempting as the price per gigabyte of cloud storage might be, recovery time and point objectives can make relying only on the cloud for data protection a challenge.

In addition, while storing data in the cloud is inexpensive, accessing it over a wide area network can prove to be an expensive proposition.

At the end of the day, most IT organizations are going to rely on a mix of local and cloud storage. The real challenge isn’t so much figuring out where to store data but actually retrieving it when it’s needed most.