Continual innovation to solve the next generation challenges Quantum

Quantum is a leading expert in scale-out tiered storage, archive and data protection, providing intelligent solutions for capturing, sharing and preserving digital assets over the entire data lifecycle. We help customers maximize the value of these assets to achieve their goals, whether it’s top movie studios looking to create the next blockbuster, researchers working to accelerate scientific discovery, or small businesses trying to streamline their operations. With a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class disk, tape and software solutions for physical, mvirtual and cloud environments, we enable customers to address their most demanding workflow challenges and opportunities.

The New Archive Workflow

Zettabytes of data, unstructured content growth, and the ever-increasing value of data are putting a strain on traditional storage infrastructure and backup. Once consumed by databases and organized data, datacenters are overtaken now by large unstructured files such as videos, images, drawings, and recordings. New content is literally breaking backup every day. More than ever, you need new technologies and new strategies to reduce the pain of backup, offer better data protection and accessibility, and reduce costs.

Instead of treating all data the same, the new archive workflow removes unstructured data from primary storage and moves it out of the backup process onto its own storage tier and workflow. The new archive workflow not only enables business growth by making data more accessible for a longer period of time, but it can also reduce storage costs up to 70 percent. Quantum can help you rethink your data protection and retention workflow by applying the right technology to the right data at the right time. Tiered storage, new extended online storage approaches, and advanced data management technologies can manage the entire data life cycle.

Accelerate Lustre HPC Environments with Quantum QXS Hybrid Storage

Reduce Time to Insight with Blazing Fast Hybrid Storage at Extreme Scale

Solving the world’s toughest problems requires complex and challenging analysis. Across the diverse fields in HPC, researchers create computational models to advance the understanding of our world and discover new possibilities. Whether in fluid mechanics, geosciences, oil and gas, genomics, climate modeling, intelligence, or network forensics—a vast amount of valuable data is being created and processed.

HPC applications require massive parallel processing and storage that can support the ultra-high streaming performance—both writes and reads—that enable HPC workflows. Quantum offers two different high-performance storage solutions for HPC workflows: StorNext® scale-out storage and QXS hybrid storage deployed with Lustre®. Here we focus on Quantum QXS hybrid storage for Lustre environments.

Success story of a delighted customer

Acendas travel doubles VM boot performance with hybrid disk

Acendas has succeeded in the hyper-competitive travel management business by providing highly differentiated services to business travelers and corporate meeting planners. “We’ve been successful for several reasons. We give every traveler personal attention—when they call us, they always talk to a real person—someone who is empowered to help them in every way we can think of,” explains James Thompson, the network support administrator responsible for the company’s network operations center.

Acendas also gives its clients access to advanced data analysis tools and advice that helps them manage costs more effectively and improve their corporate bottom line.

Leveraging Hybrid Storage Increases Performance and Controls Costs

The team recently decided to adopt disk with hybrid storage technology. Hybrid arrays combine conventional drives with flash to increase performance for I/O-intensive operations, like those associated with virtualization, while keeping costs lower than all-SSD or all-flash storage. The team looked at offerings from several suppliers.

“We saw quotes with a huge price range, and after looking at the kinds of tasks we typically support, it was not clear at all to us what kind of value we would see from the higher cost options,” says Thompson. “After doing proof-of-concept tests as part of our due diligence, we elected to stay with our existing platform, but upgrade to the Quantum QXS-4 Series hybrid storage with Q-Tier software.” QXS combines flash and conventional disk, and it boosts performance and keeps costs low by using its Q-Tier software to scan data every five seconds and automatically decide which files need to be placed on different storage tiers. Typical Quantum configurations use less than 5% of the total storage as flash, and are built using a design that eliminates all single points of failure.

Thompson explains, “Our system, which is 70TB in all, only uses 1.6TB of flash. But it gives us extremely fast performance, and we estimate that we saved roughly 25% over what other, higher priced alternatives would have cost us.”

“The QXS performance has been great,” Thompson adds. “In ‘boot storm’ situations—where we need to spin up a large number of VMs quickly—the new QXS system is more than twice as fast as our old disk array. I see the same kinds of gains when I boot up a single VM, too.”

“The QXS system had all the features and performance that we were looking for, saved us money over alternatives. The support from Quantum has been very, very good. We expect the new system to have the same exceptional reliability that we have seen from the platform over the last six years.”

Meet the Master

Jon Gacek, President and Chief Executive Officer: Jon Gacek became President and Chief Executive Officer in April 2011, and was President and Chief Operating Officer from January 2011 to March 2011. He joined the company as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer in August 2006, upon Quantum’s acquisition of Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC) and was promoted to Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer in June 2009. Previously, he served as the Chief Financial Officer at ADIC from 1999 to 2006 and also led Operations during his last three years there. Prior to ADIC, Gacek was an audit partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and led the Technology Practice in the firm’s Seattle office.

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