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So you think you know Quantum?

Editorial Type: Interview     Date: 01-2015    Views: 3128      







With 85 of the Fortune 100 businesses as customers and over 100,000 deployments worldwide, Quantum can hardly be said to be a 'best kept secret' - but these days there is a lot more to the company and its product portfolio than first meets the eye. Storage magazine editor David Tyler gets an update from Regional Sales Director Christo Conidaris.

David Tyler: It's clear from even a cursory glance at the current Quantum product offerings that the traditional view of the company as being primarily a tape solutions vendor is massively wide of the mark. So how should we be describing Quantum in 2015?
Christo Conidaris: Quantum has changed as the market has changed, and the market has changed as data itself has changed. Storage and backup used to be about databases and similar datasets - structured data - but today every business also has to deal with virtualisation, with unstructured content such as video, as well as exponentially increased volumes of data from systems using mapping/GPS, telemetry, encrypted files, and so much more.

During all of these market changes, Quantum has been able to remain 'ahead of the norm' in terms of technical expertise. This has allowed us to position ourselves as being able to offer true next generation backup solutions. We're the only vendor that sells both tape and disk-based which gives us 'device-independence'. This translates into peace of mind for our customers as they don't have to worry that they're being sold anything other than the best fit solution for their requirements.

Now we're seeing disk-based backup become a significant part of Quantum's business, with growth up by 11% in Q2 FY'15, compared to the previous year of the same period.

DT: What are some of the issues that are driving changes in how organisations plan their storage and backup?
CC: Traditional infrastructures are breaking down as a result of greater volumes of data, the variety of data types, and the need to store data forever and continue to get value out of it. Throwing more spinning disk at the problem simply won't cut it anymore, nor will legacy backup approaches. At the same time, big news stories such as the LIBOR fixing scandal are driving compliance initiatives, and as a result the finance function is much more heavily involved in the procurement process. The whole landscape is changing forever.

We see the world evolving to a new infrastructure based on tiered storage solutions with 'smart data movement' that fits a customer's unique workflows. These tiered storage solutions will need to support unpredictable, on-demand access and incorporate new approaches to backup and archiving. They must leverage technologies like cloud-based object storage, policies, and cost-effective storage like LTO and LTFS. And they will need to integrate well with Flash storage, as customers begin to rely more on fast cache for immediate work, rather than traditional RAID.

DT: But despite these new areas of focus, from your mention of LTO and LTFS, there is still clearly a place for tape?
CC: Without question: and we will continue to innovate in the tape environment. Our LTFS appliances effectively combine tape with disk, allowing partitioning - and therefore virtualisation - on tape. We've also introduced EDLM - Extended Data Life Management - an optional feature of the Scalar i6000 that provides policy based data integrity checking.

In Quantum StorNext environments, EDLM offers a policy to trigger tape scans based on StorNext's tape suspect count - enabling truly proactive, automated scanning of tapes. In addition, when suspect tapes are discovered through the EDLM scan, the Scalar i6000 works with StorNext so that StorNext can move those files to a new tape.

DT: As for your disk offerings, how do they address the issues you've already mentioned, such as virtualisation and the cloud?
CC: We recognise that deduplication is a variable, therefore we have to offer a 'capacity on demand model' when it comes to disk-based backup. At Quantum we always over-ship disk, and users can simply 'switch on' additional space via a license key as and when it is required. For virtualised environments we offer vmPRO, which is our own software for VM backup - the beauty of this approach is that users can actually boot up from the backup itself if needed. With some 84% of enterprises now leveraging virtualisation for storage/backup, this kind of innovation is crucial.



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