File manager Quantum has jumped aboard the NVM Express drive and fabric access train with a 2U, 24-slotter box and new software to accelerate users’ access to its StorNext files.
StorNext is a scale out, multi-tiered file data management product, including software and hardware such as the Xcellis arrays and Lattus object storage. It’s popular with Media and Entertainment (M&E) customers. NVMe drive support came with was V6.2 of StorNext in September last year.
The new F-Series NVMe arrays uses new software; Quantum’s Cloud Storage Platform. Jamie Lerner, Quantum’s President and CEO, said: “This platform is a stepping stone for us, and for our customers, to move to a more software-defined, hyper-converged architecture, and is at the core of additional products we will be introducing later this year.”
He declared: “This is the most significant product launch we’ve done in years.”
Quantum’s F2000 array is the first product in an F-Series and, as the diagram above indicates, can hold up to 184TB of data in its active:active, dual-controller configuration using off-the-shelf hardware. It uses dual-ported drives for added reliability.
The software stack is Quantum’s Cloud Storage Platform, offering block access and tuned for video and video-like data to maximise streaming performance. It supports NVMe-oF access from host application servers as well as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, iSER and RDMA.
Quantum says it’s tightly integrated with StorNext and designed for M and E activities such as;
- Post-production: real-time editing of 4K and 8K content.
- Sports video: coping with tens to hundreds of cameras generating multiple concurrent ingest streams and playing the content in real-time.
- Rendering and simulation: deployable in animation and visual effects studios needing high IOPs and low-latencies between large-scale render farms and the storage subsystem.
StorNext customers should see an immediate uplift in data access speed and lower latencies, along with reduced rack space needs compared to disk-based arrays.
Tom Coughlin, the President of, Coughlin Associates, provided a supportive quote: “Combined with StorNext and its out-of-band metadata management, the F-Series provides storage tiering, content protection and diverse software defined management capabilities that should be well received by the media and entertainment industry.”
Blocks & Files thinks we can expect hyper-converged Quantum products to arrive later this year. This NVMe drive and fabric all-flash array catapults Quantum into the modern storage array age and should be a building block for even more development. Storage-class memory anyone?
