The Future of Cold Storage is Here – Introducing ActiveScale Cold Storage and Quantum Object Storage Services

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Over the past several years, Quantum has quietly become the leading provider of cold storage infrastructure to the world’s largest cloud providers. Through these efforts, we’ve learned a lot about building massive, scalable cloud storage infrastructure that is easy to use and easy to manage. With this experience, and with several pioneering innovations, we are pleased to offer a breakthrough solution for helping large enterprises, research organizations, and web-scale companies easily manage and master the massive data growth with which they too are challenged.

The Challenge

With the digital transformation of nearly everything, organizations are experiencing explosive data growth. This data is mostly unstructured and mostly cold – inactive data that is accessed infrequently. Yet, it contains immense value and has the potential for future enrichment, monetization, and re-use, so it must be securely protected and remain accessible, for years, decades, and often indefinitely. Solutions today are limited and expensive – either give up control of your data to a public cloud provider and be taxed each time you access your own data, or alternatively, build costly file and object storage systems in house.

With Quantum, the future of cold storage is here.

S3 Glacier Class Storage for the Data Center

With today’s announcement of ActiveScale Cold Storage, we are introducing a new class of storage that combines advanced object store software with hyperscale tape technology to provide the industry’s most affordable, durable, and accessible cold storage archiving solution.

And based on these technologies, we are also announcing Quantum Object Storage Services, the industry’s only as-a-Service solution for both active and cold data archiving, deployable wherever your data lives – whether that’s in your in-house data center, colocation facility, or hosted IT environment.

Breakthrough Innovations

These new offerings are made possible by Quantum’s innovations – combined to form the industry’s most advanced cold storage archive with unmatched levels of performance, durability, and storage efficiency.

  1. ActiveScale Object Storage is the first and only object storage platform architected for both active and cold data, providing seamless, secure storage management and high-performance access to massive data sets.
  2. ActiveScale Cold Storage is built on Quantum’s hyperscale RAIL architecture. (That’s short for Redundant Array of Independent Libraries). A RAIL architecture, built with Quantum Scalar Tape Libraries, provides unlimited, incremental scalability, and linear performance gains, plus increased availability and serviceability. In total, RAIL enables a new level of accessibility to tape-based data.
  3. Further, ActiveScale patent-pending two-dimensional erasure coding (2D EC) software encodes data within and across tapes, tape drives, libraries, and geo-dispersed data centers, simultaneously providing industry-leading data access performance, durability, and storage efficiency.

Offered as a Fully Managed Service

Increasingly, large organizations are choosing as-a-Service solutions for their financial flexibility, agility, and simple consumption models. Quantum is enabling these Active and Cold Data solutions as fully managed, as-a-Service offerings, with a simple, competitive, two-tiered pricing model that is simple to purchase, simple to plan for, and with no data access fees. With our solution, Quantum owns, installs, manages, maintains, and monitors your private Quantum cloud storage infrastructure, delivered as-a-Service, backed by Quantum expertise, service delivery tools, and AIOps-driven analytics and monitoring.

What Does This All Mean?

In total, these offerings provide:

  • Easy, affordable accessibility of S3 and S3 Glacier Class storage in the data center of your choice.
  • Unlimited scalability of both active and cold data sets.
  • The ability to restore objects from cold storage to active storage in minutes.
  • 100x to 1Mx greater durability, and up to 40% better storage efficiency, than two copy archive solutions.
  • Reduced cold storage costs by up to 80% compared to all-disk solutions.
  • 30+% savings relative to public cloud cold storage services.
  • Outsourced storage operations and simpler data management without access fees.

Up until now, organizations have been limited in their ability to affordably manage and store the massive amounts of data that they are collecting today (up to 98% of today’s data gets thrown away and 60% of data that is stored is cold). These offerings now provide a new level of capability not only to store these growing data sets, but also to:  

  • Securely maintain in-house control of these assets
  • Easily access this data to unlock and enrich its value
  • Be confident in its preservation and protection over the coming years and decades

To Learn More

For more information on these new breakthrough innovations and offerings, please go to these additional resources:

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