NAB Show: Quantum F2100 Next-Gen NVMe 2U 24-Bay Storage System With Dual-Controller Architecture

Quantum Corp. announced the availability of the latest gen of its F-Series portfolio with the release of the F2100 NVMe storage appliance.

This system provides faster performance and more NVMe storage capacity than previous gens so M&E organizations and corporate video teams can leverage the speed and parallel processing power of NVMe to speed up production workflows, rendering, and video and image processing. The F2100 ships with the latest company’s block storage software, which introduces a unified user experience across F-Series NVMe storage and H-Series SSD/HDD storage, with many new features to give customers more flexible configuration options and better reporting and monitoring. It is integrated with the firm’s Cloud-Based Analytics (CBA) software for proactive system monitoring, and the company’s customers can access all of these customer applications using the MyQuantum service delivery platform that was recently announced.

“The Quantum F2100 builds on what we introduced a few years ago with our award-winning F-Series platform, now used in many of the world’s leading video production environments for high-speed video and image processing, rendering, and advanced AR/VR development,” says Brian Pawlowski, SVP and chief development officer. “The F2100 ships with the latest Quantum block storage software, which is now common across F-Series and H-Series product lines. This means we can deliver features and fixes faster, and also represents a key step toward delivering a truly unified user experience across Quantum StorNext, F-Series, H-Series, and our CBA software.”

This leap in performance and capacity – offering up to 50GB/s for multi-client reads, paired with the ability to offer up to 737TB of raw NVMe storage in a single system – will let the customers re-architect their workflows in demanding media, special effects, life sciences and AI/ML applications. A single system can now meet what would have previously required many racks of spinning disk storage systems to achieve. Customers can also use the StorNext 7 file system pools feature to create drive volumes composed of the F2100 and spinning disk volumes to fine-tune their workflow storage for performance, capacity, and cost, all under a single StorNext 7 namespace.

F2100 NVMe storage appliance features include:

Dual-controller architecture on 2U, 24 drive system driven by the firm’s unified Block Storage platform 2.0
Benchmarked multi-client read performance of up to 55GB/s and write performance of 20GB/s^(*)
Choice of drive sizes in 24 drive arrays including 15.36, 7.68, and 3.84TB for a maximum raw storage capacity of 737.28TB in 2U
Pre-configured RAID-6 volumes for faster deployment
Connectivity choice of 8 ports of 100GbE or 16 ports of 32Gb/s FC
Integration with CBA software for proactive system monitoring
And more features and enhancements

^(*) Performance numbers as measured on pre-release F2100 systems using video fa4k uncompressed unconstrained stream benchmark runs with 6 simultaneous client writes