Storage solutions company Quantum believes it has found a profitable niche in the mid-range, open, tape-based secondary storage market, while at the same time taking a systems approach to ensure that its customers, who are increasingly looking to reduce complexity in storage management, get a common software solution that helps them seamlessly manage across disk and tape based storage hardware.

The company seems to have found its niche in the mid-range, open, tape-based secondary storage market.

“We want to be in the secondary storage market – recovery, back-up, archive, etc., activities – where they store data, secure it and use it’’, Quantum CEO Rick Belluzo told NWC during a recent interaction.

Quantum began acquiring tape technology companies in 1998, starting with ATL Products. By 2007, it had acquired four more companies and is now a leading manufacturer of tape drives and tape libraries. It also became a member of the Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium. On the way, it shed its disk business as well as some acquired assets in the NAS appliance business.

Now, as information is exploding and its management is becoming increasingly complex, Quantum’s decision to turn to tape technology is paying off. As IT managers are looking to simplify information and data management, and due to the growing cost and ‘green’ consciousness, more and more of them are looking to an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) path that is leading them towards cleaning up their primary disk storage systems, prioritizing information, and putting more and more of it on tape storage.

“Companies are facing a huge IT spending challenge. They are spending money to save money, to get control of their IT systems, and now increasingly they are worrying about energy costs. Think of how much money one can save by bringing together a good storage management policy, tape storage and data de-duplication. And, tape storage is simply the greenest way to store large amounts of data,” Belluzo said.

But because primary storage will continue to be disk-based, Quantum is not merely selling tape drives and libraries, but it is also taking a systems approach to making information management easier across disk and tape, across hardware and software.

The DXi7500, which the company plans to introduce into India later this year, is part of such a strategy wherein Quantum is making a big play with de-duplication technology. De-duplication is an important part of overall information management. It is also working with large independent software vendors to optimize the technology to prioritize information and move non-priority data to archive. Our solution will go round storage, take out data not being used, and archive it on less expensive tape storage .  

“We have been transitioning towards becoming a systems company for some time. Now, the transition is accelerating. The India Development Center that we opened recently in Hyderabad is part of this transition. We are expanding our software teams in the US and India. The IDC will develop software to help build an integrated disk and tape storage solution,” said he.

In India, Quantum intends to educate the market and bring together the volume and value-added businesses over the next six months. ‘‘We will focus on the government, rich media and finance verticals,” Belluzo said.