Storage News
CEO Jamie Lerner On Quantum’s NVMe, Edge Computing Focus
Joseph F. Kovar
‘Putting Quantum into a cubby as a tape business is probably a pretty dated view of the company. It’s something that we sell. But we have object storage, file storage. We have ruggedized edge storage. We have cloud storage. We have data management software,’ Quantum President and CEO Jamie Lerner tells CRN.
So you mentioned StorNext 7. What should we expect to see new with version 7?
It’s an entirely new architecture. I would tell you this is the largest architectural upgrade we’ve made in the last 20 years. First of all, the entire infrastructure of the software is virtualized and in cases containerized. So the product ships as a virtual machine and in containers. Those containers can run software-defined or on purpose-built hardware that we have. The management user interface and API are entirely new. So the ease of install, ease of management, is [new]. An all-new management UI [user interface] with an all-new web services API, so the entire platform is now programmable. The user interfaces can be orchestrated using third-party orchestrators using APIs.
And it has the richest tiering engine that I think the industry’s seen. We’ve been doing hierarchical storage for decades, really between file and tape. And now we’re allowing customers to build pools of storage in any way they’d like. So they can build NVMe pools, SSD pools, hard-drive pools, object cloud. Take pools of storage and build rules that manage data movement between those pools. And then you can be moving files while hundreds of people are editing those files live, and they’re moving between different pools of storage, between on-premises to the cloud, between NVMe disk and tape. [Files] can be moving based on rules that you write, or policies that you write. So it is a major architectural transformation. And the hardware that we ship, because our product runs on virtual machines, you can now put guest VMs on it as well.
Anything else that is new?
You can hyperconverge it as well. We’re not going to market as a hyperconverged player, but one of the side benefits is our systems are fully virtualized, and there’s nothing preventing the customer from installing their own VMs alongside our VM. And there’s enough CPU and memory over-provisioning to allow for that.
And when do you expect to release it?
It will be announced in November, and then probably full production in December.
