Quantum Expands Archiving Solutions, Intros New Dot Hill Relationship

Quantum is using this week's National Association of Broadcasters, or NAB, conference to unveil an expanded range of data archiving solutions and introduce a new tiered storage relationship with Dot Hill.

Quantum is showing its new Artico intelligent NAS appliance, which takes advantage of the company's StorNext intelligent tiering storage technology, to offer NAS storage for archiving purposes.

Quantum is also giving its DXi disk-based backup appliance line archiving capabilities, and introducing a new storage node for its high-end Lattus archiving solution.

[Related: Quantum Intros Q-Cloud: Seamless Expansion From On-Prem Storage To Cloud]

Quantum this week also unveiled a new, global go-to-market partnership under which it is integrating the full line of enterprise-class disk storage systems from Longmont, Colo.-based Dot Hill to its scale-out storage and data protection portfolio as a way to expand its solutions for managing data across its entire lifecycle.

The expansion of Quantum's archiving and storage capabilities comes as Quantum also shows its improved financial situation.

Quantum last week released preliminary financials from its fiscal fourth quarter 2015, which ended March 31, showing revenue for the quarter of $145 million, up from $128 million in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2014. On a GAAP basis, Quantum said income reached about $12 million, a significant jump from the prior year's GAAP loss of $14 million.

Archiving of customer data continues to grow in importance for the channel, said Rick Crane, CEO of West Coast Technology, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based solution provider and Quantum channel partner.

"Data is growing at an insane rate," Crane told CRN. "It's hard to manage it and keep it backed up. We find a lot of customers are looking to set up an archiving solution. And they want to move to lower-cost media without needing to back it up constantly."

That is the goal for Artico, Quantum's new intelligent NAS appliance for archiving, said Mark Pastor, product marketing manager for the San Jose, Calif.-based company's data center archiving solution.

Artico implements Quantum's StorNext tiering technology as the active file system within the appliance to allow data to be automatically moved to the Artico appliance for long-term archiving as access to that data decreases over time, Pastor said.

For instance, Quantum resells Rocket Software's Arkivio archive and backup solution, which can migrate data from primary storage solutions to Artico while keeping links to the data on the primary storage medium to let applications access it even after it is archived, Pastor said.

"As data over time becomes reference material, and is just used for read requests, it can be moved to Artico," he said.

Crane said Quantum's Artico is a good archiving alternative to offerings from larger vendors.

"Customers can use Arkivio to find data that has not been touched for years, and move the data from high-cost media to Artico while leaving a stub for the data on primary storage so customers' applications don't see any difference," he said. "Archiving is not new. But automated archiving with tiers is something new to many customers."

The Artico appliances list for about $45,000 for the entry configuration of 33 TBs, and can expand to 73 TBs per appliance, Pastor said.

Quantum's DXi backup appliance going forward will be available for archiving data as well, said Marius Marcu, product manager for the DXi line.

Using the Arkivio Autostor application, Quantum's DXi4700 or DXi6900 appliances get dual functionality, including dedupe of data backed up on the appliance and archiving of that data for long-term storage, Marcu told CRN. "This gives the DXi dual use," he said. "Today, DXi is used for backups, or copies of data. Now it can also be used for archiving, where data is moved off of primary arrays to DXi for lower cost."

Quantum also introduced its new S30 storage nodes for its Lattus object storage solution. The S30 nodes now include 6-TB archive-quality drives to provide 72-TB-per-node capacity vs. the 48-TB limit of the older S20 nodes, Pastor said. That effectively lowers the cost per terabyte by about 15 percent, he said.

PUBLISHED APRIL 13, 2015