Quantum Cold Storage Service Improves Data Access, Security

Retaining data for multiple years, whether to comply with company policy or industry regulations, isn’t easy or cheap. These types of workloads also tend to be subject to high levels of data security and compliance scrutiny, which means that they must be fully secure and accessible.

These are just the types of workloads Quantum is targeting with its new long-term data archiving solution, ActiveScale Cold Storage. Quantum's managed cold storage service essentially combines the capabilities of ActiveScale Object Storage with its Quantum RAIL (Redundant Array of Independent Libraries) architecture, which the company also calls hyperscale tape technology.

15 Nines of Cold Data Durability

The idea is to bring cloud archive services to wherever an organization needs it—on-premises, hosted environments or third-party data centers. The company claims that with this new as-a-service offering, businesses will see up to 15 nines of data durability for cold data, a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and superior security.

The architecture allows both cold storage and active storage infrastructure to be deployed at one or two sites using data replication, or at three sites using 3GEO Dynamic Data Placement (DDP). Data buckets can also be migrated and replicated between ActiveScale and public cloud environments in support of hybrid cloud environments, according to Quantum.

Quantum's cold storage service uses AWS S3 Glacier Storage Class for storage, along with AWS S3 APIs and lifecycle policies to store, migrate and restore objects to and from the cold data archive. Applications and services that use the AWS S3 Glacier Storage Class can use the same API to read and write data to the ActiveScale Cold Storage service, the company said.

Other important features include two-dimensional erasure coding and Quantum Scalar tape storage. Two-dimensional erasure coding software encodes data within and across tapes, tape drives and libraries, and data centers, with the goal of improving data access performance, data durability and storage efficiency. Quantum’s RAIL architecture is highly available and scalable tape storage.

Combining object storage software with hyperscale tape technology is a creative way to go, said Andrew Smith, research manager for cloud infrastructure services at IDC.

“It’s unique that a fully managed cold storage tier is being delivered from a vendor that also provides tape media, drives and libraries,” he said. “And the technical innovation Quantum has embedded at the tape tier to meet the price/performance needed in a cold storage service that customers expect, using their own IP, is also a differentiator.”

In addition to announcing ActiveScale Cold Storage, Quantum also announced new object storage services for both active and cold data.