Quantum Upgrades StorNext for Distributed Enterprises

After adding public and private cloud support to its StorNext platform last year, Quantum turned its attention to the storage demands of distributed enterprises and their collaborative workforces for the next major release.

This week, the company unveiled StorNext 6. This time the company is tackling the storage demands of businesses whose teams may be spread across different time zones. Where enterprise NAS (network-attached storage) systems fall short, StorNext picks up the slack, according to Molly Presley, vice president of Global Marketing at Quantum.

“While traditional NAS and general-purpose, scale-out storage offerings increasingly fall short in meeting today’s escalating unstructured data management demands, Quantum continues to deliver even greater advancements in our StorNext-based solutions,” said Presley in a statement. “We designed StorNext 6 to give businesses and other organizations the ability to interact with their data in new ways and thereby drive greater creativity, productivity, innovation and insight.”

When it ships this summer on Xcellis and StorNext M-Series, and as an upgrade for StorNext 5 customers, StorNext 6 will include two new features that encourage increased collaboration.

FlexSync technology automates data synchronization between StorNext systems. It supports multiple file replication scenarios (one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one) and enables users to set the scope of their replication tasks, anywhere from a specific file to an entire file system.

Using the company’s high-performance file system metadata monitoring technology, FlexSync can instantly detect changes and push the updated files to other systems. Since it doesn’t require a file system lockdown to identify file changes, the feature can replicate files to remote systems in minutes and seconds, versus hours using conventional approaches. As a perk, the technology offers up-to-the-minute data protection.

Another feature called FlexSpace allows global workforces to get on the same page. Customers can use FlexSpace to establish an archive repository that supports multiple instances of StorNext and allows distributed teams can use to access and share data. In keeping with the company’s cloud-enabled approach to enterprise file storage, the solution support both public cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud) and private cloud storage.

Both features help ensure that a business’ storage lives up to its productivity goals.

“In today’s world, with many teams globally dispersed, Quantum’s FlexSync and FlexSpace allow for greater collaboration on a common data set without interrupted access to data,” said Rector told InfoStor. “Users located anywhere in the world can share a single archive repository and easily access the same data set.”

Also new is a quality of service (QoS) feature that enables organizations to allocate bandwidth to individual workstations, ensuring that high-priority workloads get the throughput they need. A new file copy expiration feature enables businesses to automate the removal of file copies stored on expensive storage, freeing up space for higher-value data.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.