10 November 2020

Quantum has expanded its storage portfolio with the addition of the ATFS (All-Terrain File System), the company said.

ATFS is NAS-type file storage based around a file system, with enhanced capabilities in terms of its ability to interrogate file metadata, tag files and provide multiple management options based on rules applied to them.

It is the result of Quantum’s acquisition of Atavium earlier this year - the latter manages data and optimises migration of data and workflows. It provides search and policy-based tiering, which range from on-board flash to external and cloud storage. It applies “zero-touch data classification” to classify files as they pass through workflow. It can also provide virtual file system views of specific datasets based on tags in metadata.

ATFS comes in hardware appliance format with a node taking up to 24 NVMe drives plus 24 spinning-disk HDDs. Base capacity starts with eight NVMe drives and 18 HDDs. Up to four JBODs can be attached to an ATFS node to give up to 4PB of raw capacity. Erasure coding lops that down by about 20% in practice.

ATFS connectivity to hosts is SMB or NFS and claimed throughput is 12GBps. It aims to target organisations’ increasing needs to deal with large amounts of unstructured data, said product marketing director Noemi Greyzdorf, and to allow for visibility into that data.

The move comes as Quantum also announced an upgrade to its StorNext file system products to version 7.

StorNext is aimed at customers that need high performance for largely sequential and parallelised workloads, such as in video production, geospatial and surveillance operations.

ATFS is for customers that don’t have the same high throughput sequential needs, but do need data classification and management, such as those in legal, life sciences, financial services and healthcare.