Quantum ATFS Software Combines Data and Storage Management Platform

Quantum Corp. unveiled its data and storage management platform ATFS (All-Terrain File System).

It is the first NAS platform to integrate real-time data classification and insights with the needs of applications, determining how storage resources are allocated and consumed. Data insights enable organizations to visualize data without the constraints of a file system, automate purposeful data placement based on policies, and optimize resources using just-in-time data movement policies. The ability to support the needs of data and applications on premise or in the cloud advances company’s strategy to be the provider of management and storage services for unstructured data anywhere.

“The engineering teams at Quantum worked with storage experts to address the many challenges IT teams face with growing storage needs. They designed an innovative and unchained solution with cutting edge technology, data provenance and analytics to provide a storage platform that works for IT, instead of IT that works for storage,” noted Jeffrey McDonald, PhD, director, IT, The Hormel Institute.

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Optimize storage resources based on and for benefit of data
Customers are performing ‘unnatural acts’ to manage their data – guessing at capacity and where data lives, or crawling file systems for days to find what is needed by the business. They are often uncertain about what they can delete and when they can delete it. The results are silos of data, and a loss of control and visibility. ATFS meets this challenge. It is designed to ensure just-in-time purposeful placement of data, meeting the performance, resiliency, availability, and access demands of applications and workflows. As a result, it delivers a consistent end user experience to deploy resources on premise or in the cloud.

By leveraging data classification, metadata and business-oriented tagging to streamline and optimize storage resource consumption, ATFS transforms storage economics, eliminating the premium organizations pay for performance. It is designed to manage hardware resources as a service to the application when and where it is needed it at scale.

“The ATFS system we have at 5 Guys Named Moe is the backbone of our extremely high bandwidth cloud data migration work,” said Eric A. Reid, head, post-production, 5 Guys Named Moe, Inc. “Utilizing the metadata tagging built into the ATFS platform allows us to prioritize data efficiently and make sure that NVMe space is automatically allocated to the most resource intensive tasks without any manual input. This reduces costs overall while ensuring we have the right balance of storage space and high-end performance available for our workflows.“

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Predictable, consistent performance
ATFS ingests data, which can be placed into flash, bulk, or the cloud based on policies, application defined tags, or manually. Performance may be tuned based on the size of the active data set. Automated policies place data ‘just-in-time’ to support workload, while achieving greater efficiencies and improved productivity per unit of storage.

Cloud collaboration and data mobility
By automating data classification and placement, ATFS serves a range of use cases:

• Automate application workflows: Integrate with asset management tools, schedulers, and other applications to automate tasks using API in life sciences, M&E, finance, and more.

• Active data retention: Metadata and tags simplify access to data over time.

• Deploy resources in cloud: Burst into th cloud using cloud-based applications reuse ATFS for large data set retention.

• Collaboration: Secure data sharing across the organization and externally without creating duplicates.

• Control data: Execute on retention, protection, and access guidelines per regulations, best practices, to ensure data provenance.

ATFS is available to order beginning this December as software installed on a company’s appliance.

Scott Sinclaire, senior analyst, ESG, said: “Cloud adoption continues to accelerate, as businesses demand greater elasticity from their storage resources, their compute capabilities, and their budgets. ATFS is designed for this new data landscape, to provide businesses with the insight necessary to extract value from their unstructured data.“

Ed Fiore, GM, primary storage, Quantum, commented: “For customers with millions or billions of files, classifying those files so they can be organized, searched, and then placed based on rules is a key advancement toward getting control of massive unstructured data sprawl. We designed the ATFS platform to address these challenges, to align an application’s needs with storage resources in real time, and to provide deeper insights into data.“

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Resources:
ATFS DS    
ATFS Appliances DS
ATFS Cloud Tiering Archive
Hormel Institute case study
VirtualQ I Transform Events on November 17-19. The company will host this event, an online forum for unlocking the value of unstructured data. Participants will gain industry perspectives on the forces and trends shaping Quantum’s technology roadmap and get access to executives, as well as product and technical leaders. Registration

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