Quantum unveils Xcellis Scale-out NAS

Quantum (NYSE:QTM), famous leader in secondary storage, continues to extend and promote primary storage with part of its portfolio. The company just announced Xcellis Scale-Out NAS as a new iteration of the union of StorNext and Xcellis delivering a high performance highly scalable file storage solution. I invite you to read the full announcement on StorageNewsletter with the associated long comment.

The new solution uses a scale-out approach both for capacity and access as both layers can scale independently. NAS means industry file sharing protocols with NFS and SMB and in that case the file system is exposed through multiple NAS heads but each file is fully write via one head. To leverage the parallelism of the platform, users must use the client software or agent able to split and stripe data across multiple storage targets.

The solution also introduces a good set of data services such automated tiering, encryption, point in time copies, WORM, load balancing and data protection with replication, RAID and erasure coding to list a few. Multiple configurations are possible from full flash to hybrid, entry level and finally an archive model illustrating a wide range of flexible configurations to fit in various environments.

With this announcement, Quantum maintains the contact with the club of top commercial file storage players such Avere Systems, Elastifile, Panasas, Qumulo, Rozo Systems and WekaIO.

We understand that the company must react to some revenue erosion for several quarters even years and the recent departure of his long time CEO John Gacek and CTO Bassam Tabbara. FY 2018 will be interesting to watch.