70,000 Shipments of Quantum StorNext

Quantum Corp. announced that more than 70,000 StorNext File System licenses have been sold to date, supporting an increase of almost 20% more customer usage in less than nine months.

With the addition of new, easy-to-deploy appliances to its StorNext product line since 2011, Quantum has continued to build on its leadership in big data environments. Providing both software and hardware solutions that enable users to share, manage and automatically archive massive files, StorNext plays a central role in big data intensive industries as media and entertainment, life sciences, government, and oil and gas.
 
StorNext has delivered ROI, as recently reaffirmed in research sponsored by Quantum and written by IDC, an industry analyst firm. The resulting IDC white paper, Demonstrating the Business Value of StorNext (August 2012), reports that StorNext customers (per 100 users) experienced a return of $6.47 for every $1 invested over three years, with payback in just over four months.
 
While managing big data places stress on IT infrastructures, IDC found that over three years StorNext customers saved more than $423,000 per 100 users, reflecting a:

• 69% improvement in IT storage staff productivity,
• 82% reduction in service disruptions/outages, and
• 14% increase in operations productivity.

StorNext is used in big data environments where only a scale-out file sharing and tiered archive system can provide the performance, flexibility and cost-effectiveness required to manage massive amounts of data. In environments such as media and entertainment and video surveillance, content must be delivered quickly and support the demands of high-resolution video formats. In life sciences, volumes of scientific data continue to grow as next-gen instruments become less expensive and there is a need for economical and scalable tiered storage to manage the files. In fact, according to the IDC white paper, sponsored by Quantum, StorNext customers interviewed for the white paper each had storage assets on average of 5.2PB or 3.3TB per employee which is 1,000 times the industry average.
 
The StorNext File System is a performance shared file system that supports access to data over SAN and LAN topologies. It is available as a standalone software license or packaged in a StorNext Metadata appliance. It enables file delivery performance by providing file locking and metadata management that does not take place in the data path. It also supports storage tiering and archiving through its StorNext Storage manager software and StorNext AEL Archive appliances. Policies can be automatically set to migrate files to a secondary disk or tape tier for reduced storage costs or archiving, with user access to such files managed transparently through the StorNext File System. Archived tapes can also be vaulted inside or outside the library for further cost savings and can be monitored for data integrity to ensure that content stored on tape will be accessible again.
 
To simplify StorNext implementations, Quantum also offers StorNext Gateway appliances to enable fast and highly available access to shared data over Ethernet, where its proprietary Distributed LAN Client technology performs more than 50% faster than traditional NFS or CIFS protocols. Additionally, the StorNext Q-series storage line provides high-speed primary storage that is optimised for a range of big data environments.
 

Janae Stow Lee, SVP, Filesystem and Archive, Quantum, said: "Quantum is committed to helping its customers evolve and capitalise on new opportunities. Whether it’s the monetisation of media content for broadcasters or ingesting and processing highly detailed video surveillance images, StorNext has long served as the key technology enabling the management of massive data files for organisations of all sizes. Not only do our growing StorNext shipment numbers validate this point, but we now have the ROI metrics to quantify the tremendous value we bring to customers."