Quantum’s Storage Leap Dumps Dupes

Quantum , reborn as a backup and recovery specialist after
exiting
the hard disk drive market, has upgraded the data-management software it
acquired when it purchased ADIC last year.

StorNext 3.0 brings data sharing to servers on the local area network (LAN)
and includes Quantum’s data de-duplication technology, which deletes
duplicate data to reduce required storage capacity.

Reducing redundant data via de-duplication is a major efficiency boost for
customers concerned about keeping their capacities in check. Startups such
as Avamar, Data Domain — which filed for an IPO earlier this week — and
Diligent are all embracing this practice.

StorNext helps customers build an infrastructure for consolidating resources
so that workflow operations run faster and business-asset maintenance costs
less.

Nathan Moffitt, product and marketing manager of software for Quantum, told
internetnews.com via e-mail that StorNext 3.0’s Distributed LAN
Client lets applications access a high-speed pool of video, images, audio
files and analytical data shared by all servers on a SAN
 or LAN  using clustered gateways for
access.

Moffitt said the software’s Data Reduction Storage is a special disk tier
that uses data de-duplication to reduce capacity requirements and moves data
between different disk and tape resources to reduce costs and protect
content. Also, data location is virtualized so that any file can easily be
accessed for reuse even if it resides on tape.

StorNext 3.0’s Dynamic Resource Allocation increases uptime by making it
possible for storage administrators to add capacity or swap out disk arrays
during hardware upgrades while the system is still online.

Quantum, which competes with EMC , IBM , Sun
Microsystems and a host of startups in the backup and
recovery software market, got into the data-management game by buying ADIC and its StorNext platform in 2006.

With that move, Quantum inherited the de-duplication software that ADIC acquired when it purchased RockSoft.

StorNext 3.0, which Quantum plans to ship in the second quarter,
is the refreshed fruit of those ADIC and RockSoft integrations.

The platform follows the inclusion of RockSoft’s de-duplication technology
on Quantum’s DXi3500 and DXi5500 appliances, which the company introduced last December to help eliminate and compress redundant data with
de-duplication.