Quantum Scale-out NAS for Data-Intensive Workloads

Quantum Corp. announced Xcellis Scale-out NAS, a workflow storage appliance to provide the management capabilities and robust features of enterprise scale-out NAS with the cost-effective scaling organizations need to address data growth.

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It delivers greater than 3X the performance of competitive enterprise NAS offerings and, with integrated storage tiering, an end-to-end solution can cost 1/10 that of alternative enterprise NAS solutions with the same capacity and performance. This combination makes Xcellis Scale-out NAS unique in comprehensively addressing the needs of high-value data environments where the organization’s revenue and products are all built around data.

Unified Unstructured Data at Scale 
Many IoT, media and entertainment, life sciences, manufacturing, video surveillance and enterprise HPC environments are outgrowing traditional enterprise NAS. Users have typically turned to scale-out NAS over the past decade as an alternative but are finding that scaling capacity, integrating cloud strategies and sharing data are afterthoughts or not even possible with the solutions they’ve adopted.

Unlike enterprise IT workloads, data in high-value workload environments is constantly growing on every axis – ingest, processing, analysis, distribution, archive. These environments require storage solutions with the management and features of enterprise NAS, but which can also cost-effectively scale performance and capacity. Leveraging Quantum’s StorNext parallel file system and data management platform, Xcellis Scale-out NAS offers performance, scalability and management benefits for organizations with high-value workloads:

• Cost-Effective Scaling of Performance and Capacity: Clusters can scale performance and capacity together or independently to reach hundreds of petabytes in capacity and TB/s in performance. A single client (SMB, NFS or high-performance client) can achieve over 3X the performance of competitive scale-out NAS offerings with multiple clients scaling a single cluster’s bandwidth to over 1TB/s. In addition, an end-to-end solution with Xcellis has been shown to manage petabytes of data in a simplified workflow incorporating tape or cloud that provides greater performance than NAS-only alternatives for a tenth of the cost.
• Advanced Features and Flexible Management: With simple installation and setup, a modern administrative single-screen interface provides in-depth monitoring, alerting and management functions as well as rapid scanning and search capabilities that tame large data repositories. Xcellis Scale-out NAS is designed to integrate with high performance Ethernet networks through SMB and NFS interfaces and offers the flexibility to also support high-performance block storage in the same converged solution.
• Lifecycle, Location and Cost Management: Xcellis Scale-out NAS leverages more than 15 years of data management experience built into StorNext. Xcellis data management provides automatic tiering between SSD, disk, tape, object storage and public cloud. Copies can be created for content distribution, collaboration, data protection and disaster recovery.

Artificial Intelligence With Xcellis 
Xcellis Scale-out NAS is a NAS solution with integrated AI capabilities that enable customers to create more value from new and existing data. It can actively interrogate data across multiple axes to uncover events, objects, faces, words and sentiments, automatically generating custom metadata that unlocks new possibilities for using stored assets.

Xcellis Scale-out NAS will be generally available this month with entry configurations and those leveraging tiering starting at under $100 per terabyte (raw).

Vincent Chang, president, Arrosoft Solutions, said: “Frankly, it is hard to find an offering that can deliver on performance, scale and management while keeping costs down. Xcellis Scale-out NAS provides the reseller community with a Quantum solution that is easy to position for organizations facing unstructured data growth challenges across any of a number of areas including performance, capacity, cost, management, protection, cloud strategy and artificial intelligence.”

Scott Sinclair, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy, said: “The proliferation of unstructured data in a vast array of industries offers virtually unlimited opportunity for discovery and monetization, but traditional storage and management of that data has kept many organizations from achieving their full potential. Xcellis Scale-out NAS is designed to empower users to scale performance and capacity independently and cost-effectively to keep storage from becoming an obstacle to progress.“

Molly Presley, VP, global marketing, Quantum, said: “There is a gap in the market between NAS systems designed for enterprise data management and HPC solutions designed for data-intensive workloads. Xcellis Scale-out NAS fills this gap with the features needed by enterprises and the performance required by HPC in a single solution. Xcellis uniquely delivers capacity with the economics of tape and cloud and integrated AI for advanced data insights and can even support traditional block storage demands within the same platform.”