A high percentage of the unstructured data that most IT organizations are struggling to manage now comes in the form of video files. As more applications than ever employ some degree of video, IT organizations of all sizes are trying to cope with terabytes, sometimes even petabytes, of data.
To make it simpler to cope with managing massive volumes of data, Quantum Corp. this week unveiled StorNext 6, a file management system that makes use of replication and database technology to both keep track of where files are located and optimize the replication of large volumes of data.
Molly Presley, vice president of global marketing for Quantum, says deploying StorNext 6 enables IT organizations to employ FlexSync replication to more intelligently copy data between on-premise IT environments using any type of storage medium and cloud computing environments without having to deploy dedicated cloud gateways.
“We’re optimizing for large data stores,” says Presley.
In addition, Presley says, IT organizations can search and query the metadata Quantum stores in its database to enable collaboration in addition to being able to more easily distribute data across geographic area via a FlexSpace capability that now makes it possible to treat multiple archives as if they were one logical entity.
Other new features include support for a quality of service (QoS) engine that can be used to manage how much bandwidth gets allocated to any client devices as well as tools that automatically move data to less expensive tiers of storage when not being used. In fact, Presley says that as IT organizations find themselves needing to archive more data, there is now increased reliance on tape technologies for archival purposes. The metadata Quantum captures also serves to make it simpler to find and retrieve data stored on tape, adds Presley.
IT organizations may be able to store more data than ever in a finite amount of physical space. But no matter how space is consumed, the simple fact remains that managing all that data is more difficult than ever.
