Quantum video storage customers range from police to pot growers

Quantum’s scale-out storage business is growing like a weed, with the help of a large weed grower.

While Quantum’s DXi disk backup library increased the most of all its product lines last quarter, the StorNext scale-out storage business excites CEO Jon Gacek the most.

You have to love a market where deals include tape plus disk, and range from law enforcement to legal marijuana merchants. The Quantum video surveillance storage business last quarter included all of that.

Gacek said Quantum closed the most video surveillance deals ever last quarter. Running through a list of large wins, he included police departments in Canada and India, as well as smaller law enforcement agencies and “a company focused on [the] emerging cannabis growth market, where surveillance of the facility is critical.”

Each large Quantum video surveillance deal included StorNext software, disk plus tape, “reinforcing the power of our tiered storage value and expertise,” Gacek said on Quantum’s earnings call Wednesday.

Flash, dense drives push disk backup deals

Quantum’s disk-based backup revenue grew 17% year over year to $22.9 million. That success came after the release of the enterprise DXi6900-S deduplication library that uses flash to speed up data ingest. The 6900-S also includes Seagate 8 TB self-encrypting hard disk drives. Gacek said DXi libraries won seven-figure deals at an Asian taxation department, a European insurance company and other large deals at a U.S. telecom and European supermarket chain.

“It’s a combination of flash that handles metadata and 8 terabyte drives that give it density. Nothing else looks like it,” Gacek said of the DXi6900-S.

Scale-out (StorNext) revenue increased 12% to $39.8 million, including Quantum video surveillance deals. Scale-out storage also includes media and entertainment, and technical workflows such as unstructured data archiving. Quantum claimed more than 100 new scale-out customers and a near-70% win-rate in the quarter in scale-out tiered storage.

Total data protection revenue, including tape, increased 3% to $83.1 million despite a small drop in tape automation.

Overall, Quantum’s revenue of $133.4 million for the quarter increased $5.4 million over last year, and its $5 million profit follows a slight loss a year ago.

Gacek forecasted revenue of $120 million to $125 million this quarter, which is Quantum’s fiscal fourth quarter. “We are teed up for a good one next quarter, but I am not using superlatives like great and fantastic yet, which I think we have potential for,” he said.

Quantum video surveillance, archiving deals include tape

Part of Gacek’s reason for optimism is new uses for tape in cloud archiving.

“We believe there is a shift in tape usage to the archive scale-out, cloud-like architectures,” Gacek said. “And I think you are going to see tape media usage go up quite dramatically as an archive use case.”

More legalized marijuana might help as well.