Quantum Grows Lattus Object Storage Disk Archive Line

When Quantum unveiled Lattus, the company’s line of disk-based Big Data archiving systems, in November, it carried a big business price tag. The company announced on Nov. 13 that when its 500 TB Lattus-X storage system went on the following month, it would cost $675,000.

Designed to serve as a petabyte-scale long-term repository for wide area networks, the Lattus-X offers NAS access to files with self-healing and automated multi-site protection features. Lattus-X supports CIFS, NFS and HTTP REST and its access nodes employ 12TB of disk cache and in-memory cache to speed up ingest and retrieval times. A base system can handle up to 400 million files.

Aimed at tiered storage environments, Lattus-M version leverages the company’s StorNext File System environment to enable direct access through files stored on Lattus after they’re migrated from high-performance storage. The system also boasts enhanced data protection via error correction algorithms that the company claims provides better durability than RAID. Lattus-M can manage 1 billion files per StorNext metadata controller.

Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Terri McClure noted during its debut that Quantum’s approach offered some Big Data management benefits. “Traditional RAID architectures are not designed to support the performance, availability and sheer scale required by big data archives. Quantum’s decision to enhance its big data solutions by incorporating next generation object storage technology is a smart move and adds a compelling new product line to their portfolio,” she said in company remarks.

Now the company is lowering the barriers to entry.

Quantum unveiled a smaller Lattus model that offers 126 TB of capacity starting at $375,000. Should a customer’s storage needs and budgets grow, the company assured that they “can seamlessly upgrade to the larger-capacity Lattus system as their data demands increase.”

In a statement, Janae Stow Lee, senior vice president for Quantum’s Filesystem and Archive division, suggested that businesses are seeking Big Data storage solutions that don’t break the bank.

“We developed Lattus so that customers could fully leverage the value of their growing big data archives. Over the past six months, we’ve talked with users having smaller entry needs that could clearly benefit from object storage, and we’ve seen a general need to make it easier for users to test, evaluate and deploy object storage solutions,” stated Lee.

As a bonus, customers will be able lower storage costs by moving data from their pricey primary NAS systems to nearline disk archive tier, and provide the proper levels of data availability and accessibility, according to Quantum.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.