Storage manager and protector Quantum has added a Z200 all-flash product to its ActiveScale object storage line with a focus on AI and data lake workloads.
The ActiveScale products have until now been disk-based and positioned as object storage suitable for high-performance computing secondary storage workloads. They accept S3 protocol requests and can frontend a Scalar tape library which provides virtually unlimited storage for low access rate object data. There is a single namespace across disk and tape, and the ActiveScale software provides erasure coding and geo-spreading across three sites to increase data resiliency.
Bruno Hald, Secondary Storage VP for Quantum, said in a statement: “With the introduction of the ActiveScale Z200, we are meeting the need for a fully integrated enterprise object storage solution that merges high-performance scale-out flash and scale-out tape libraries to build data lakes and storage clouds of outstanding scalability, simplicity, performance, and cost efficiency, without compromising data availability and long-term durability.”
Quantum claims that, with its high throughput and flexibility to densely store metadata for billions of objects in flash, plus its integrated ability to durably store massive amounts of data in nearline tape storage, the ActiveScale Z200 reduces the overall cost of data lakes, storage clouds, and long-term archives, and enables easy data access to massive data sets for additional analysis, model recalibration, and re-monetization.
It is, the company claims, “the industry’s only object storage platform architected for both active and cold data.” This makes it suitable for “building massive data lakes, storage clouds, and long-term archives,” with a smaller overall footprint and cost than competing systems.
Performance
A Quantum spokesperson told Blocks and Files: “We have optimized the Z200 for price/performance to meet a variety of use cases and lower cost entry points rather than absolute performance, i.e. each Z200 is 32 core, 256 GB, 25GbE, 15 TB SSD configs as compared to 48-64 core, 100GbE systems being sold at a premium today. On a per core basis, we achieve double the performance of other vendors and scale linearly.
“It’s important to recognize that our stated performance reflect real-world achievable performance. We have seen recently some real gamesmanship in object storage performance benchmarks which include three-way mirrored config for GETs, 4+2 EC config for PUTs and only four drives configured per server, all in the same benchmark. Grossly expensive and unachievable in a real-world config.
“Our roadmap includes beefier configs, higher density drives, and QLC drives as well, so stay tuned. Performance has scaled well on these beefier configs.”
Competition
NetApp has an all-flash StorageGRID object storage product. Scality added all-flash object storage support in 2020 and object storage startup rival Cloudian also has all-flash support. IDrive added all-flash support to its e2 object storage last year.
