Quantum Corp. has completed its acquisition of the ActiveScale object storage business from Western Digital Technologies, a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp. The acquisition expands Quantum’s leadership role in storing and managing video and other unstructured data using a software-defined approach, according to an announcement.
Western Digital’s ActiveScale Cloud storage solutions are used to store unstructured data that requires a massive amount of scalable storage space that is cheap, fast, and reliable.
“The strategic acquisition of ActiveScale bolsters our existing product portfolio and expands our addressable market providing critical software capabilities that enhance our go to market strategy with minimal risk to Quantum,” states Jamie Lerner, President and CEO, Quantum. “With engineers who developed ActiveScale’s erasure-coded object store software now on our team, we are in a position to pursue new object solutions truly optimized for managing video and other unstructured data.”
The ActiveScale product line adds object storage software and erasure coding technology to Quantum’s portfolio, enabling the company to expand its product offerings in the object storage market. Object storage has emerged as a potent response to the exponential growth of video and other forms of unstructured data, the announcement states. This content requires high-speed capture and processing of data (typically done with a file system like Quantum’s StorNext solution), that is often retained for years or decades.
Examples of this unstructured data include video and images for entertainment, video surveillance and security, marketing and training and more. Prior to the acquisition Quantum supported the ActiveScale object storage product line for more than five years.
Western Digital has been shedding its storage systems business for some time now as competing against such storage systems giants as Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, NetApp and Hitachi became increasingly difficult, according to anandtech.com. In 2019, 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.
