Quantum Upgrades StorNext Software

StorNext 3.0 will help cut data-retention cost and enable customers to expand storage capacity and replace storage devices while keeping the system online.

Quantum Corp. has launched a new version of the StorNext data management software to help customers construct an infrastructure for consolidating resources to cut costs and improve workflow operations.

Slated to ship in the second quarter of this year, StorNext 3.0 extends data sharing to servers on the local area network and leverages Quantum's data deduplication technology to reduce the cost of data retention.

Nathan Moffit, product marketing manager for software at Quantum, said the platform boosts input/output performance and enables faster project completion via high-speed data sharing. In addition, it automatically moves data between storage tiers of disk, tape and network-attached storage, he said.

"Quantum StorNext data-management software enables customers to generate revenue faster and store more data at a lower cost," Moffitt said in an interview with eWeek. "By combining high-speed data sharing with cost-effective content retention, StorNext helps customers build an infrastructure for consolidating resources so that workflow operations run faster and maintaining business assets costs less."

StorNext 3.0 features a specialized tier of disk that uses data deduplication to reduce a customer's data footprint, saving money by lowering capacity requirements and enabling data to be retained on fast recovery disk for a much longer period of time, the company contends.

The release also offers dynamic resource allocation, which increases uptime by allowing customers to expand their storage repository without shutting down clients and by moving data off one physical device to another without interrupting data access, Moffitt said. In the latter case, which the company calls stripe-group data movement, the customer is able to move files from one disk resource in the file system to other disk resources.

"This movement occurs while the system is online - unlike other products - and data is available," Moffitt said. "Once the data is moved of the old disk resource, it can be pulled out. This would be done when swapping out hardware that was old or out of service contract."

Quantum inherited the StorNext platform when it bought ADIC in 2006, a move that put them in direct competition with a number of vendors in the data-sharing and data-retention markets. Still, the company has sought to distance itself from its competitors with the product's open architecture, which allows it to support many OS types and hardware platforms, Moffitt said.