Quantum Corp. has announced availability of the Scalar i6H, a new tape storage system designed for hyperscale archive environments.
The Scalar i6H is a modular tape storage system that was designed in collaboration with some of the world’s largest hyperscalers and is now being made available to web scale companies and enterprises looking to build private clouds. According to the company, the Scalar i6H offers storage density and sets a new standard for tape ease-of-use. It can be shipped fully assembled in a rack, everything is customer-serviceable and replaceable, and technicians with no tape expertise can easily manage many systems at large scale.
In addition, the Scalar i6H offers anti-ransomware features such as Scalar Ransom Block for building cyber-resilient private clouds.
The Scalar i6H is the latest in a string of recent innovations that advance Quantum’s competitive leadership position in building and managing hyperscale cloud infrastructure for data archiving, cold storage, and data protection.
“Several years ago, we set out to develop tape solutions that are market leaders both technically and commercially in the hyperscale market,” said Bruno Hald, vice president and general manager, secondary storage for Quantum. “We now have seven hyperscale and web scale accounts globally that have collectively deployed over 35 exabytes of capacity in hundreds of Quantum tape systems around the world, including many Scalar i6H systems that are already deployed in some of the world’s largest data archives. The Scalar i6H is our latest generation tape library platform designed to be deployed in hyperscale archive environments as part of a Quantum Redundant Array of Independent Library, or RAIL, architecture. The combination of this architecture with the density, serviceability, and other unique Scalar i6H features make it the leading choice for exabyte-scale private clouds.”
Scalar i6H systems are deployed one rack at a time, which makes it faster and easier to deploy new tape capacity as archives grow. A Quantum Redundant Array of Independent Libraries, or RAIL, architecture is a more modular way to build large private clouds. Rather than store tens of thousands of tapes in a single tape system, organizations can build tape archives in a “scale out” manner, adding modular tape systems one at a time, which makes it faster and easier to deploy new tape capacity as archives grow.
This also means that tape capacity can be deployed in a non-contiguous fashion, allowing hyperscalers and other large organizations to be more flexible about where tape is deployed for secure, cold data storage. Combined with smart erasure coding software that can write objects to multiple tape systems, such as patented two-dimensional erasure coding software introduced with ActiveScale Cold Storage, RAIL allows these large data storage services to provide secure, durable, and low-cost storage for cold data archiving.
The Scalar i6H system is now generally available to purchase from Quantum. To learn more, visit the Scalar i6H product page at www.quantum.com/en/products/tape-storage/scalar-i6h.