Quantum is looking to increase adoption of high-performance NVMe storage with the announcement of a new entry-level version of its F-Series appliances, the F1000.
Coming out on the heels of the F2000 hardware announced last year, the F1000 is tuned for performance over fiber channel and 100 GbE, maintaining the same software-defined architecture and fast streaming and response times as the F2000. The trade-off for price is availability, Quantum said. While the F2000 is a 2U dual-node server with hot-swappable compute canisters, redundant 1800W power supplies, and no single point of failure, the F1000 is a 1U single-node server.
The F1000 uses RAID 10 data protection and can support read throughput of up to 33 GB/sec and write throughput of up to 17 GB/sec, Quantum said, with connectivity options including 32 GB fiber channel or iSER RDMA via 100 GbE. It’s available with 38.4 TB or 76.8 TB of capacity using 10 NVMe drives. (The F2000, by comparison, can have up to 153 TB in a single 24-drive appliance.)
Both of the F-Series appliances are designed to improve the highest tier of performance in StorNext scale-out storage clusters. Files can move between storage pools in order to ensure that NVMe storage is occupied only by data that’s in high demand. That level of performance can help facilities work with bandwidth-intensive UHD and HFR video formats over IP-based networks rather than using more expensive fiber-channel infrastructure, Quantum says.
Quantum also argues that the F-series appliances, with their high storage density and reliable low-latency access, can both reduce the need to over-provision storage in order to guarantee certain performance goals and decrease the rack space required compared to traditional HDD or SSD-based systems.
