Today I’m with Mark Pastor (Product Marketing Manager at Quantum) and we talk about:
– Quantum product portfolio and strategy
– A comment about HGST acquiring Amplidata
– Q-Cloud: cloud based archiving
Enjoy the podcast!
Full transcript of the chat
Enrico: Hi everybody! I am your host, Enrico Signoretti, and this is Juku Beats. Today, I am here with Mark Pastor, Product Marketing Manager at Quantum. Hi, Mark. How are you?
Mark: I’m doing great, Enrico, thank you.
Enrico: Good. So you have been briefed about how this podcast works. This is a five-minutes podcast, three questions. So I go straight to the questions. And the first one is about the fact that you are a very well-known company in this industry and, Quantum, as an integrated work-flow based multi-tier [inaudible 00:00:38] project strategy, can you spend a few words in describing it and how the components are integrated together?
Mark: Sure. As you said, Quantum has a broad portfolio that really extends across data and content needs for active work-flow, for data protection, as well as for archives, and the goal of our portfolio is to offer really the best fit solutions for our customers with needs in those specific areas. So the specific lines we’ve got … So StorNext offers a complete and end solution for data and content work-flow, our DXi line of business is very successful, in both cost-effective and high-performance [inaudible 00:01:27] due to backup environments. We’re a market leader in tape automation with our scalar line of business, and that offers really the most intelligent, cost-effective storage solutions, particularly for archive and long-term storage use cases. And finally, we’ve got our Lattus Object Storage Project Line, and that really offers the most cost-effective solution for online storage global access to data or content.
An example of how these are integrated together might be if we look at our StorNext Solutions, which are very unique in their ability to take advantage of all of these storage technologies. They can integrate them into a policy-based management environment that really manages the movement of data or content to and from these various technology tiers. All of that really happening behind the scenes, where all the customer knows is they get the data when they need it.
So each of our product lines addresses a portion of the work flow. As you said, we’ve got all the tools that are really critical to the work flow environment, and we’ve got tremendous tools to bring all those together based on customers’ needs.
Enrico: Good. So [inaudible 00:02:44] looks like and important component of your product line-up. Can you comment on [inaudible 00:02:49] acquisition by HGST. Will it have consequence for your customers?
Mark: Sure, yeah, that’s very recent news. We’re actually very excited about the HGST acquisition [inaudible 00:03:02] data. WD and HGST really offer a much broader set of resources than [inaudible 00:03:10] data alone could have done. We really feel that that opens up tremendous opportunity for our relationship to deliver and market even broader and deeper solutions that … to further meet our customers’ needs. So our customers should really be very, very positive about this news, and I look forward to working with HGST in developing even deeper and broader solutions for our customers.
Enrico: I have another question for you and the fact that [inaudible 00:03:44] has added a new option lately. It’s called Q-Cloud. It’s like cloud-based archiving option. Can you explain how it works and how it fits in the overall strategy?
Mark: Sure. I did not include that in the first comments, so I think it’s great that you asked a question on that. The bottom line is that we really want to enable our customers to put their data in the right place at the right time, with the right technology, all of that being directed by their application and their use of their data. We actually already have been offering cloud-based services to our customers as a complement to our DXI solutions. It really provides off-site copy of data … really focused around data-protection purposes.
We realize there’s many other reasons why customers are looking to take advantage of the cloud, whether it’s to take advantage of [inaudible 00:04:44] model, to spread costs out, or maybe they like the notion of a global-wide area network access to data, or there may be other factors that they like about [inaudible 00:04:55].
So our new Q-Cloud archive offering that we recently announced is really there to add that option to our portfolio so that our Quantum customers can be comfortable knowing that there’s a public cloud option that’s also fully-integrated into the Quantum Solutions Suite.
With Q-Cloud Archive … One of the things we feel about it is with the Q-Cloud Archive Solution, we’ve really taken away a lot of the potential hurdles and burdens that customer-based … related to support, to data movement, to management of adding public cloud infrastructure to their environments. That’s a really important component that customers need to be aware of when they consider leveraging public cloud infrastructure. So our integration of the Q-Cloud Archive option really adds a lot of value in making it much easier to integrate that into their environment.
Ultimately, adding the Q-Cloud Archive to our portfolio really fully enables what we think is going to be the more prominent model, hybrid cloud approach, that we think is important for customers to have as an option.
Enrico: Thank you very much for your time, and see you soon!
Mark: Very good, Enrico, thank you very much! Good talking to you!
Enrico: Okay, bye!