Quantum Enhances StorNext Software

Quantum Corp., a global data protection and Big Data management service provider, has announced StorNext 4.3 software which brings new intelligence features, greater performance and increased scale to managing Big Data. Incorporating a new database and supporting up to one billion files and dozens of petabytes of tiered storage, StorNext 4.3 pushes the boundaries for file system and archiving performance.

The latest generation StorNext software also includes capabilities such as archive on ingest, active vaulting and project-based capacity management – all benefits designed to further manage the volume, velocity and variety found in massive unstructured data and to extract maximum value from it. StorNext 4.3 is built to address emerging big data requirements in digital media content, genomics research, video surveillance and natural resource exploration.

To store data economically for the long-term, StorNext 4.3 supports Active Vault, a closely managed vault within the tape library that offers a much lower cost than the robot-accessible active shelves. User-defined, site specific policies automatically recommend tapes to be active vaulted, track their location, and monitor data integrity. When the data is needed again, an operator moves the tape from the Active Vault to the active shelves of the library.

When large numbers of files are ingested from sensors, cameras or other capture devices, the primary copy of data must reside on tape for economical reasons. Leveraging its new database architected on MySQL, StorNext 4.3 automatically protects Big Data and provides faster file truncation speeds to enable efficient “archive on ingest” at the scale of Big Data. When a file is written to a StorNext-managed repository’s disk system, the software immediately archives or truncates the file to a large-scale tape library with minimal impact on ingest rates because only a small reference to the file remains stored on disk.

Compute-intensive analytical applications, such as genetic sequencing and video transcoding, require high-speed file access, but not SAN speeds. StorNext’s proprietary Distributed LAN Client (DLC) protocol leverages Ethernet to enable access speeds that are up to 50 percent faster than CIFS or NFS. With version 4.3, StorNext DLC Windows clients can experience a maximum throughput improvement of 360 percent over 10 GbE and 60 percent for 1 GbE.

The latest version of StorNext adds the flexibility and intelligence to manage storage capacity on a per-project basis through directory quotas. StorNext also improves archive performance for small files that are often archived along with large files.

Many formats for storing Big Data use a series of multiple files versus a single very large file. To improve streaming read performance, StorNext 4.3 provides a new utility that can intelligently re-align files in these multi-file formats so they are stored contiguously on disk after retrieval from the archive. StorNext 4.3 also improves file creation times up to 50 percent, which improves overall write performance for multi-file formats such as DPX.

Janae Stow Lee, Senior Vice President, Filesytem and Archive, Quantum, said, “Quantum continues to push the limits and evolve StorNext with customers’ Big Data management needs in mind. With re-architected tiered storage capabilities, StorNext enables customers to achieve greater scale, performance and reliability when managing content. This latest version of StorNext also leverages our vertical market expertise by including features for big data file formats and workflows that have specific requirements, thereby helping to maximise the value of the stored information.”