Quantum Corporation
Quantum Corporation is a data storage and management company headquartered in San Jose, California. The company works with a network of distributors, VARs, DMRs, OEMs and other suppliers. From its founding in 1980 until 2001, it was also a major disk storage manufacturer (usually second-place in market share behind Seagate), and was based in Milpitas, California. Quantum sold its hard disk drive business to Maxtor in 2001 and now focuses on integrated storage systems.

History

Plus Development Corporation
Quantum was originally a market leader in 8-inch hard disk drives, but missed the industry's transition to 5.25-inch drives. In 1984, a subsidiary was launched called "Plus Development" to focus on new technology development. Plus Development became a successful designer of 3.5-inch drives with Matsushita Kotobuki Electronics (now Panasonic) as the contract manufacturer. Quantum later reacquired Plus Development and was the largest drive producer worldwide in 1994.

DEC storage group acquisition 
In July 1994, Quantum purchased DEC's data storage division.

Quantum–Maxtor merger
By 2000, the hard drive market was becoming less profitable. Quantum decided to sell its hard drive division to Maxtor at this time. The transfer took effect on April 1, 2001. Although Maxtor systematically eliminated much of the staff of Quantum's former hard drive division during the following year, it continued most of Quantum's disk storage products and brands until it was acquired by Seagate Technology on December 21, 2005.

Loans during Pandemic CARES Act
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Quantum was a recipient of a government loan of US$10 million as part of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). With a head count of ~800 employees, this would be equivalent of receiving over $12,000 per employee.

The SBA sets its size standards for qualification based on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) industry code, and the size standards for the Computer Storage Device Manufacturing Industry (NAICS code 334112) is 1,250 employees. Quantum qualifies for the PPP which allows businesses in the Computer Storage Device Manufacturing industry with fewer than 1,250 employees to obtain loans of up to $10 million to incentivize companies to maintain their workers as they manage the business disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Acquisitions 
Prior to the 2000 merger of the hard drive division, Quantum began a series of tape technology acquisitions:
 1998 – ATL Products, a manufacturer of automated tape libraries.
 2001 – M4 Data (Holdings) Ltd., a manufacturer of tape libraries.
 2002 – Benchmark Storage Innovations, who manufactured the VStape product line under a Quantum license.
 2005 – Certance, the former tape business of Seagate Technology, becoming a member of the LTO consortium.
 2006 – Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC), Scalar brand tape libraries, StorNext filesystem and De-Duplication technology.
 2011 – Pancetera Software, a specialist in data management and protection for virtual environments, for $12 million.
 2014 – SymForm, a cloud storage company.
 2020 – ActiveScale object storage business acquired from Western Digital.
2020 – UK-based Square Box Systems Ltd, maker of CATDV and a specialist in data cataloging, user collaboration, and digital asset management software.
2021 – Video surveillance assets from Pivot3, a hyperconverged infrastructure company.

Products

Fireball 

The Fireball brand of hard drives were manufactured between 1995 and 2001. In 1995, 540 MB Fireball hard drives using ATA and SCSI were available. In 1997, the Fireball ST, available in 1.6 GB to 6.4 GB capacities, was considered a top performer, while the Fireball TM was significantly slower.

High-performance file system software

StorNext 
At the core of Quantum's high-performance shared storage product line is Quantum StorNext software which enables video editing and management of large video and image datasets. StorNext software is a parallel file processing system that provides fast streaming performance and data access, a shared file storage environment for Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, and Linux workstations, and intelligent data management to protect data across its lifecycle. StorNext runs on standard servers and is sold with storage arrays that are used within the StorNext environment. These storage arrays include Quantum QXS-Series,  a line of high performance, reliable hybrid storage arrays, offered with either HDDs, SSDs, or some combination of the two. 
StorNext software can also manage data across different types, or pools, of storage, such as public cloud object stores and disk-based object storage systems. StorNext supports a broad range of both private and public object stores. For customers that archive video and image data for years, StorNext is also integrated with tape storage, and can assign infrequently-used but important data to tape to create a large-scale active archive. 

In 2011, the company added the StorNext appliance offerings to its product family. In addition to the StorNext Archive Enabled Library (AEL), the company added a metadata controller (StorNext M330), a scale-out gateway appliance (G300), and several scalable storage systems (QM1200, QS1200 and QD6000). In February 2012, the company bolstered the StorNext appliance family with the addition of the QS2400 Storage System, followed in May by the M660 metadata appliance.

F-Series NVMe 
In April 2019, Quantum introduced F-Series, a new line of NVMe storage arrays “designed for performance, availability and reliability.” Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) flash drives allow for massive parallel processing, while the latest Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking technology provides direct access between workstations and the NVMe storage devices. These hardware features are combined with Quantum Cloud Storage Platform and the StorNext file system to provide storage capabilities for post production houses, broadcasters and other rich media environments.

Tape storage 
Since 1994, when it acquired the Digital Linear Tape product line from Digital, Quantum has sold tape storage products, including tape drives, media and automation. In 2007, Quantum discontinued development of the DLT line in favor of Linear Tape-Open, which it began selling in 2005 following its acquisition of Certance.

In 2012, Quantum introduced its Scalar LTFS (Linear Tape File System) appliance, which offers new modes of portability and user accessibility for archived content on LTO tape.

In 2016, Quantum refreshed its Scalar LTO tape library family and added an appliance for rich media archiving. The three new systems are part of the Quantum Scalar Storage Platform aimed at handling large-scale unstructured data. The Scalar i3 and i6 support LTO-6 and LTO-7 tapes. The Quantum Scalar i3 is designed for small to medium-sized businesses and departmental configurations. It scales up to 3 PB in a 12U rack space. The Quantum Scalar i6 is a midrange library for small enterprises. It scales up to 12 PB within a single 48U rack.

The StorNext AEL6 archiving appliance combines the Quantum Scalar i6 library with Quantum's StorNext data management software for archive storage. It has self-healing auto-migration and targets rich media use cases.

Backup appliances  
Quantum introduced its first disk-based backup and recovery product, the DX30, in 2002 and has continued to build out this product line.

At the end of 2006, shortly after its acquisition of Advanced Digital Information Corporation (ADIC), Quantum announced the first of its DXi-Series products incorporating data deduplication technology which ADIC had acquired from a small Australian company called Rocksoft earlier that year. 
Quantum expanded and enhanced this product line. 

DXi-Series products incorporate Quantum's data deduplication technology, providing typical data reduction ratios of 15:1 or 93%. The company offers both target and source-based deduplication as well as integrated path-to-tape capability. DXi works with all major backup applications, including Symantec's OpenStorage (OST) API, Oracle SBT API, Veeam DMS, and supports everything from remote offices to corporate data centers. Quantum includes almost all software licenses for each model in the base price.

In 2011, in addition to its DXi-Series of disk backup products, Quantum offered its RDX removable disk libraries and NDX-8 NAS appliances for data protection in small business environments. In 2012, Quantum announced a virtual deduplication appliance, the DXi V1000.

In January, 2019, Quantum refreshed its DXi series, with the addition of the DXi9000 and DXi4800. The DXi9000 targets the enterprise market, scaling from 51 TB to 1 petabyte of usable capacity. The 12 TB hard drives allow for more storage using less physical space. The DXi4800 is a smaller-scale appliance targeting midmarket organizations and remote sites.

Virtual machine data protection 
Quantum's vmPRO software and appliances are used for protecting virtual machine (VM) data. vmPRO software works with DXi appliances and users' existing backup applications to integrate VM backup and recovery into their existing data protection processes. It auto-discovers VMs and presents a file system view, allowing users to back up VMs or files within VMs without adding VM-specific agents. When data is read through the vmPRO software, inactive data is filtered out, reducing backup volumes by up to 75% and boosting deduplication rates. To support fast recovery, vmPRO software augments traditional backup with a simple VM snapshot utility that creates native-format VM copies on secondary disk, allowing restore at a VM or at a single file level.

In March 2012, Quantum announced that its vmPRO technology and DXi V1000 virtual appliance had been selected by Xerox as a key component of the company's a key component of Xerox's cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) services.

In August 2012, Quantum announced Q-Cloud, its own branded cloud-based data protection service, which is also based on vmPRO and DXi technology.

Media asset management software 
CatDV is a media management and workflow automation platform that helps organizations manage large volumes of unstructured data such as video, images, audio files, and PDF digital assets. The software catalogs and analyzes these files and can be used with Quantum’s StorNext file storage.

Object storage 
In late 2012, Quantum introduced the Lattus product family OEMed from Amplidata, an object storage system composed of storage nodes, access nodes and controller nodes for large data stores.  
Lattus-X was the first disk-based archives in the Lattus family that includes a native HTTP REST interface, and CIFS and NFS access to applications.

In 2020, Quantum entered into an agreement with Western Digital Technologies, Inc. to acquire its ActiveScale object storage business. ActiveScale allows companies to manage, protect, and preserve unstructured data, from a few hundred terabytes to tens of petabytes. It is used in industries such as media and entertainment, surveillance, big data, genomics, HPC, telecom, and medical imaging.

Video surveillance storage 
Quantum has a number of products that capture and store video data, including video recording servers and hyperconverged storage systems. The VS-HCI series provides hyperconverged infrastructure for surveillance recording and video management.

In July 2021, Quantum acquired assets and intellectual property from Pivot3, a hyperconverged infrastructure technology company. Pivot3’s video surveillance appliances, NVRs, management applicatons, and scale-out hyperconverged software are sold under Quantum’s VS-Series product portfolio.

Autonomous vehicle edge storage 
Quantum’s R-Series Edge Storage is a ruggedized storage system that captures large amounts of data generated by vehicles. The removable storage allows the data to be quickly transferred to a centralized data center.

References

Manufacturing companies based in San Jose, California
Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Computer storage companies
Computer companies established in 1980
1980 establishments in California