Quantum has announced that it had agreed to acquire ActiveScale object storage business from Western Digital. Western Digital’s ActiveScale cloud storage solutions are used to store unstructured data that requires massive amount of scalable storage space that is cheap, fast, and reliable. ActiveScale has not been growing at Western Digital for a while now, but it will fit quite well into Quantum’s portfolio sitting between high-performance SSD and HDD-powered storage systems and low-cost tape-based storage systems.

Today’s ActiveScale systems can store up to 57.55 PB of data that is protected using technologies like erasure coding, BitSpread, and BitDynamics. Performance wise, ActiveScale can offer up to 75 GB/s throughput in a scale-out configuration. Western Digital has been getting rid of its storage systems business for some time now as competing against such storage systems giants as Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, NetApp, and Hitachi that control over 50% of the market (according to IDC) is very hard these days. Last year the company sold off its IntelliFlash all-flash storage arrays business to DDN and said it would consider various strategic options for its ActiveScale business.

As it now transpires, Western Digital will sell its ActiveScale division to Quantum for an undisclosed sum. Quantum expects to close the transaction by March 31, 2020.

Quantum will continue to support existing ActiveScale customers and devices, though the company stresses that it acquires ActiveScale mostly because of software, technologies, and specialists. The company’s future plans include creation of object storage solutions featuring HDDs and tape.

Jamie Lerner, President and CEO, Quantum, said the following:

"As Quantum returns to a growth path, we will be evaluating strategic acquisitions that bolster our technology portfolio. Object storage software is an obvious fit with our strategy, our go-to-market focus, and within our technology portfolio. We are committed to the product, and to making ActiveScale customers successful, and we look forward to engaging with them to solve their most pressing business challenges around storing and managing unstructured data. With the addition of the engineers and scientists that developed the erasure-coded object store software, we can deliver on a robust technical roadmap, including new solutions like an object store built on a combination of disk and tape."

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Source: Quantum

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  • Samus - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link

    Wasn’t quantum bought by maxtor, who was then bought by seagate?
  • sandtitz - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link

    Same company. Quantum offloaded the HDD business to Maxtor.

    Many companies were using Quantums DLT tape drives back in in 90s/00s.
  • MenhirMike - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link

    Quantum is also a big player in the LTO market. I think they and IBM might be the only two companies actually manufacturing drives, unless another one entered that market by now.
  • dgingeri - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link

    At nearly the same time they sold their HD business to Maxtor, they also bought up Adic, a tape library company with many government contracts. It's been those government contracts that have carried Quantum over the last 25 years, through failure after failure of trying to break into other markets.
  • dgingeri - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link

    So, Quantum's Xcellis and Lattus didn't gain much market share, so they think they'll buy others' products to do it. Yeah, well, that'll end up just like all the others in the last decade: forgotten and withering. Quantum's management doesn't know what they're doing. They're a bunch of accountants, not techies, so they don't know tech or what to do with it.
  • LordConrad - Thursday, February 6, 2020 - link

    Back in the day, I loved the Quantum Bigfoot drives. The larger drives were a great way to get more storage, as long as you had a 5 1/4 inch drive bay available.
  • Slash3 - Thursday, February 6, 2020 - link

    They were fairly quiet, too, as a consequence of the reduced rotation speed and timbre of the larger housing. Seek times were awful, though.
  • mode_13h - Friday, February 7, 2020 - link

    Holy Moley! I'd heard of Bigfoot drives, but I guess I never realized they were 5.25"!
  • Scipio Africanus - Wednesday, February 12, 2020 - link

    This article gave me a flashback. Gonna go spec out my new system now with a Quantum Fireball drive and Orchid video card.

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