Difference between revisions of "What is QuantaStor?"

Revision as of 11:53, 28 January 2013

QuantaStor is an SAN/NAS (iSCSI/FC/NFS) Storage System OS for use with commodity 64bit hardware.

QuantaStor was designed from the start to be a powerful next generation storage system OS for use in public and private clouds. To accomplish this we've engineered out much of the complexity that storage system manufacturers commonly burden administrators with by following the famous adage "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.". Much of this increased management efficiency and ease of use is readily understood once you begin using QuantaStor's web management interface via your web browser.

How is it unique from other SANs?

QuantaStor has a number of powerful features like thin-provisioning, compression, and massive snapshot scalability that you'll find on other enterprise level storage systems, but what makes it truly unique about QuantaStor is its multi-tenancy capabilities through what we call storage clouds and our scale-out management technology QuantaGrid.

With storage clouds you gain the ability to allocate what is essentially a virtual storage system within the storage system so that groups of users can securely self-service provision network shares and storage volumes. Rather than having to purchase new hardware for a new project or team, with our grid technology you can add more resources to the grid and securely share them among multiple customers. Storage cloud users and cloud administrators login to the system they can only view and manage resources within their associated cloud(s) and all other resources are protected and secured away.

QuantaStor also has one of the most advanced web 2.0 management interfaces on the market which we call QuantaStor Manager. With QuantaStor Manager there is no software to install, you just point your web browser at the storage system and you'll be presented with the login dialog nearly instantly. With QuantaGrid you're able to link multiple systems together that can be a mix of local and remote systems into a grid so you can manage it all via a single pane of glass.

How is it sold?

QuantaStor is sold as software or hardware, and there is also a Free/Community Edition which supports up to 4TB of disk. The other product editions of the QuantaStor software are all licensed on a per-terabyte basis and can be purchased directly from our web site. For pre-packaged hardware solutions please see our Partner Reseller page for a reseller near you.

Secure & Customizable

QuantaStor is built on top of Ubuntu Server as it's core OS and this gives you the power to customize QuantaStor in unique ways that are not possible with other storage systems. Though you do not need to ever login to the system console except at initial installation and for some upgrades, the use of Ubuntu Linux underneath allows us to leverage the powerful tools and a security envelope that comes with the Ubuntu platform that simplifies upgrades and maintenance of the system saving you time and energy.