Quantum announces the acquisition of the ActiveScale business from Western Digital, bringing object storage software and erasure coding technology to the Quantum portfolio. The financial details of the deal are not available.
"Object storage software is an obvious fit with our strategy, our go-to-market focus, and within our technology portfolio," Quantum says. " 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."
According to IDC, unstructured data will make over 80% of all the data in the world by 2022. Unstructured data includes video and images used in any number of applications, as well as data generated by industries such as genomics research, driver assistance systems, and geospatial exploration, among others. Such content requires high-speed capture and processor, before it is retained for many years, if not decades. ActiveScale systems can store up to 57.55PB of data with protection including erasure coding, BitSpread and BitDynamics, with performance reaching up to 75GB/s throughput in scale-out configuration.
WD has been wanting to sell the ActiveScale division for a while, since it involves competition with giants such as Dell EMC, HPE, IBM, NetApp and Hitachi. Last year it managed to sell the IntelliFlash all-flash storage arrays business to DDN, and then it admitted it was considering strategic options for ActiveScale. As the new owner, Quantum says it will continue supporting current ActiveScale customers and devices, and it will make use of the technology to develop object storage solutions making use of HDDs and tape.
The acquisition closes on March 2020 following the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.
Go Quantum Announces Agreement to Acquire Western Digital's ActiveScale Business
