Quantum Lattus for Disk Archiving
Using Amplidata technology
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on November 13, 2012 at 2:44 pmQuantum Corp. unveiled a new family of wide area storage, Lattus, which provides globally distributed disk-based archives that are scalable and cost-effective and allows storage of data forever on disk without interruption or migration.
Integrating dispersed object storage and Quantum file system technologies, these solutions offer a new approach to archiving that overcomes the limitations and inefficiencies posed by traditional disk architectures in multi-petabyte storage environments.
Lattus-X, the first product in the Lattus family, is a wide area storage solution with NAS access that will be available next month. In addition, Quantum plans to introduce two other Lattus solutions in 2013, a policy-tiered disk archive storage system leveraging the company’s StorNext Storage Manager software and a cloud-based disk archive offering.
Benefits of Wide Area Storage Solutions
Lattus is built to address the challenges inherent in current solutions based on RAID architectures that grow to the petabyte level and beyond in industries such as digital media, science research, surveillance and energy exploration. Incorporating next-generation object storage technology, Lattus products are optimized for managing large and growing repositories of big data indefinitely, thereby enabling customers to extract the data’s maximum value over its entire life.
Other benefits include:
- Unparalleled scalability to support flexible big data growth;
- Self-healing, with up to fifteen 9’s of durability to ensure data is never lost;
- Self-migration for seamless upgrades to new storage technologies;
- Native HTTP REST support for web and cloud-based access; and
- Cost-effective enterprise archive capability across global locations.
Initial Lattus Products
Lattus-X provides flexible NAS access to a disk-based archive that begins at half a petabyte in capacity and supports unlimited scalability per system. It is for multi-site organizations that must cost-effectively share and archive large data files and maintain fast ingest and predictable retrieval times. In addition to native HTTP REST access, it also provides CIFS/NFS access for users and applications.
Quantum’s second Lattus product – Lattus-M – will leverage the policy-based benefits of StorNext Storage Manager. Available in the first half of 2013, Lattus-M will enable customers to have a new secondary storage tier option that offers lower latency and more predictable restore times than tape at a price appropriate for long-term storage. In addition to providing policy-based tiering to traditional disk and tape, StorNext will be able to migrate data automatically to a Lattus-based disk archive.
Later in 2013, in conjunction with partners, Quantum plans to introduce a set of Lattus-based services that will enable shared multi-tenant, encrypted storage – with a combination of NAS, StorNext and native cloud interfaces – as a 2nd or 3rd tier in the cloud.
Pricing and Availability
Lattus-X will be available in December from Quantum and its qualified resellers and partners. List price for the Lattus-X base system, which stores 500TB of big data, is expected to begin at $675,000.
Terri McClure, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group, said: "Traditional RAID architectures are not designed to support the performance, availability and sheer scale required by big data archives. Quantum’s decision to enhance its big data solutions by incorporating next generation object storage technology is a smart move and adds a compelling new product line to their portfolio. Building on a proven track record of StorNext products in key big data markets, Quantum’s new Lattus line significantly strengthens the company’s strategic position in this space."
Janae Stow Lee, SVP, Filesystem and Archive, Quantum, said: "Quantum has helped customers solve big data challenges for over two decades with tiered storage solutions that integrate disk and tape technologies. With our new wide area storage solutions, we’re expanding our big data portfolio to include a new class of storage that utilizes next-gen object storage to significantly exceed the capacity, durability, and geographical limits of RAID while delivering 100 percent predictable restore times often not met with tape. With our Lattus family, we’re now able to provide global disk archives for data that must live forever, be cost-effectively accessible, and stored once on a system with no need for future migrations."
Comments
Next month is supposed to be available from Quantum a new disk storage subsystem especially for archiving named Lattus-X (derives from latus, the latin word for wide).
In the first half of next year, Stornext software will be added to build a larger storage system, Lattus-M, tiering the data on primary storage, Lattus HDDs and Scalar tape libraries.
Cloud functionality will happen later.
What's Lattus-X?
It comprises three base modules - as well as two internal network switches:
- S10 storage node, a 1U rackmount device with 36TB on twelve HDDs in JBOD configuration (not RAID)
- C10 controller node, to manage these storage nodes and execute algorithms that encode the data into objects and disperse them to S10.
- A10 access node, a NAS head with data caching for file system access (CIFS, NFS or HTTP REST), able to manage up to 400 million files.
Lattus-X
The minimum configuration of Lattus-X is 500TB of user capacity in a 27U rack with twenty S10 with 1GBE connexion, three C10 with 10GbE between them, and one A10. It can expand to hundreds of petabytes via global object namespace and additional controller, storage and access nodes.
At the heart, there are innovative and proprietary technologies from Amplidata, BitSpread and BitDynamics, for high volume of media & entertainment and unstructured data applications - not for critical applications like databases -, following an agreement between the two companies last May. No RAID is used to avoid the huge time to reconstruct an array in case of high-capacity drive failure and the excessive price of disk mirroring. The objects are written on several nodes associated with check blocks giving the possibility to replace a failed HDD and reconstruct the data without interruption of the system. These technologies are more adapted to get high transfer rate than access time. Into Lattus-X, the raw and user capacities are respectively 720TB and 500TB, which means 44% for redundant data, more than for a classical RAID-5 (20%), not far for RAID-6, but without any expansive controller, and the possibility to scale to petabytes without requiring virtual disk reconfiguration.
Our opinion:
The first X version of Lattus can be ordered only by wealthy companies, probably mainly in the media, entertainment & post-production, satellite images, sciences & engineering and surveillance industries for data not to be stored indefinitely, as the price per gigabyte is high $1.35 ($675,000/500TB), even with no-RAID technology. The second M version (for 1H2013) could have a larger market share with the addition of file system Stornext and the possibility to use Lattus-X as a disk cache in front of another tier, Scalar tape libraries, to diminish the price per gigabyte for archive storage. The last version to be latter announced by Quantum will add an essential element: the possibility to get all these objects from the web. At the end, it's a configuration which appears to be similar to Amazon Glacier with really slow access time because of the robotics and the sequential access on tapes but with the lowest cost never seen for hundreds of petabytes of long-term archiving data being accessed on the web.
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