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Raising the Bar for Active Archive Solutions

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As recently announced in this press release , Quantum has joined the Active Archive Alliance. This makes tremendous sense for Quantum as we are in an elite field of companies that develop and offer a comprehensive set of storage solutions, covering the entire storage infrastructure for organizations whose businesses capitalize on the enormous value of their unstructured data. Key to these organizations’ success is their ability to mine their data. Active archiving is about enabling nimble data searches in a rapidly expanding universe of files and objects, when companies need it, and being able to retrieve it quickly and put it into the appropriate workflow.

Unlocking the Value of Archival Data

An active archive workflow allows users to effectively retrieve data or content from where it lives and copy it into a process flow. Some processes require extreme compute power, such as scientific analysis, AI, or intensive video editing. Other tasks are less compute-intensive, such as viewing, sharing or annotating video or other unstructured data.

Quantum has been a long-standing member of the active archive solution provider industry, but with our recent additions of Atavium and ActiveScale , we are raising the bar for active archive solutions.

The technology we gained through Atavium provides substantial value to organizations by enabling automatic discovery of data with real-time analytics, using zero-touch data classification and tagging on ingest. Users can manage the data automatically according to its lifecycle requirements and simplify risk and compliance by managing data according to policy. It also provides global search and analytics to scan data for abnormalities in seconds instead of days or weeks.

ActiveScale is a best-in-class on-premise object storage solution that has proven itself as a real customer pleaser by delivering on these key value propositions:

  • Set and forget operation: Self-checking, self-healing, extremely durable, and simple to manage. Customers have 100PB+ environments managed by a single admin who rarely needs to interact with the solution outside of monthly check-in and monitoring.
  • High performance at scale: A unique, patented method for spreading erasure coded data across components to eliminate the need for disruptive rebalancing in the event of component failure or system upgrades. ActiveScale just keeps performing.
  • Multi-geo deployment: Our unique approach to spreading data delivers a high performing, fully consistent 3-geo capability that provides up to 19 9’s durability and maintains full access to data even in the event of a site disaster.

In addition to these newer entries into Quantum’s portfolio, Quantum is a leading provider of tape solutions for enterprises and massive hyperscale scale environments where tape is a key element of low-cost archive as well as ransomware protection . Quantum also provides primary storage solutions satisfying the needs of some of the most demanding video and unstructured data workflows in the world.

We are excited about this opportunity to help Active Archive Alliance subscribers to architect the most performant and cost-effective solutions possible to meet their demanding requirements.

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Quantum and Veeam V10: A Perspective from VeeamON 2020

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In the last few weeks, we’ve had the opportunity to co-present with our partner Veeam at Quantum’s VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event, and also engage with Veeam customers at the recent VeeamON 2020 show. And even with so much focus on enabling remote work, enabling hybrid- and multi-cloud infrastructures, and all the new features in Veeam V10, we continue to see interest and engagement when it comes to these topics:

1.  Ransomware protection and 3-2-1-1 data protection practice

A long-time best practice more relevant today than ever, the 3-2-1-1 rule specifies three copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, where one copy is offsite, and one is offline, air-gapped, or immutable. There are a couple of new twists to this rule that we’ve been emphasizing:

  • The first is that the ‘offsite’ copy is increasingly in the cloud. Cloud services from AWS, Azure, and others are growing like crazy, and Veeam and other backup applications can now easily make an offsite copy to the cloud. This can replace recovering tapes from a vault in many cases, which can take a long time and is difficult. However, in this paradigm, tape still plays a role – as an on-premise “offline” copy of your data. Veeam and Quantum continue to advocate keeping a copy on tape, and with the Active Vault feature that Quantum introduced earlier this year as part of our Ransomware Protection Packages , administrators can store backup copies in a totally secure, offline environment without ever handling tapes.
  • The second nuance is this notion of an ‘immutable’ copy of data. LTO tape has had Write Once Read Many (“WORM”) functionality for many years, and combined with its inherent offline nature, AES-256-bit encryption, and it’s low cost and low power, tape is an ideal immutable data vault. But our customers are also looking to use object storage for long-term storage for compliance, and that’s why we are in the process of certifying our ActiveScale object storage system to be Veeam Ready. We expect to make that announcement in July.

2.  It’s all about availability of your production systems and applications

Even with all the new features and many different backup and protection technologies being employed, at the end-of-the-day, it is about maximizing the availability of your production environment. Even protecting applications that run in the cloud. And with Veeam V10 and Quantum DXi (a Veeam Integrated backup repository), we continue to improve performance so our customers can maximize availability with faster backups and restores.  One new feature in Veeam V10 is called Fast Clone, or Block Clone, and the latest version of Quantum DXi software can leverage this feature to dramatically speed up synthetic full backup performance.  Creating a synthetic full backup that use to take hours now can be completed in minutes, and we’ve reduced the strain on the network and Veeam backup infrastructure dramatically. This latest enhancement builds on the Veeam Data Mover Service (VDMS) integration that DXi has had for several years and makes DXi the clear best choice for a Veeam backup repository.

Achieving 3-2-1-1 Data Protection

And now that Quantum can bring together Veeam Integrated backup repositories with DXi, a soon-to-be-Veeam-Ready object store in ActiveScale, and industry-leading tape storage with unique Active Vault software, we are in a truly unique position to deliver infrastructures to Veeam customers, so they can achieve 3-2-1-1 data protection.

See these related resources for more information about Quantum & Veeam solutions:

To view our Partner blog, click here

This Week at the Q

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Welcome to ‘This Week at the Q’, our blog series that wraps up the week by sharing our Top 5 happenings. Despite being a shorter holiday week, nothing seemed to slow down!

1. TechTarget published an article in SearchDataBackup, “Why Tape-based Backup is Making a Comeback,” highlighting the benefits of modern tape platforms for backup and archive. In this, Diana Salazar, Product Marketing Manager, discusses the value of tape for archiving, the many cost benefits, and air-gapped protection against ransomware: “When you use tape-based backup and physically remove it from the network, you sever the connection and protect it from cyberattacks such as ransomware.”

Quantum Scalar i6000

2. Since our acquisition of ActiveScale from Western Digital in March, we’ve integrated quickly! We’ve just updated our object storage product page with several resources. With data only increasing in our ever-connected society, we have posted case studies to show how others are protecting and managing mountains of data and extracting more value from it.

ActiveScale Object Storage Quantum

3. We have a new white paper, “Evaluating Adobe Productions using a StorNext Shared Storage Environment,” that describes the results of recent lab-testing with Adobe Productions in Premiere Pro with StorNext . Everett Ward, Technical Marketing Engineer, walks through the test environment and summarizes the results, showing a seamless, collaborative workflow with Adobe Productions and the StorNext file system.

4. This one is for our French-speaking community. Quantum’s Stephane Cardot is featured in a podcast interview, “Le Stockage Objet: Are you ready?” with Le Podcast Français du Stockage. Stephane discusses object storage with hosts Yoann Castillo and Philippe Nicolas.

5. For our customers in Korea, we are hosting a new event, VirtualQ | NAB 2020 – 퀀텀 솔루션 하이라이트 , on July 21st. Please join our local experts, Hoebong Park and Jaekyun Yu, where they will present the latest trends in media and entertainment, and host live Q&A.

VIRTUALQ NAB 2020 퀀텀 솔루션 하이라이트

For those of us in the U.S., I wish you all a safe Independence Day remembering we all share the right to freedom and equality.

Natasha

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Crisis Management Strategies for Your Remote Workforce

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We salute all those IT folks working day and night to ensure their organizations continue to be secured and protected while getting ourselves through the current crisis. It is by far one of the most challenging times, but you have pulled us together, so that remote workers can stay connected, secured, and productive for keeping our economies moving forward – after all, we are all in this together.

Racing to Protect Remote Endpoints, Fast

We hit a crisis never seen before and one we are not quite out of it. IT managers all over the world went from zero to 100 mph in 6 seconds because the crisis caught most by surprise and bulldozed right into their data center. Next thing you know, most of your internal customers (employees) had to work remotely, throwing your finely tuned tools and processes off-track. IT managers now had to ensure the laptops assigned to employees were secure and all those endpoints and company data leaving the comfort and security of their four-walls were protected. Needless to say, security and data protectio n shot straight up to the top of the list of priorities and procedures to implement.

Crisis Management Strategies Rolled Up into One Guidebook

This brings me to the reason why we created this guidebook titled, “IT Manager’s Guidebook – Essential Strategies for Data Protection and Business Continuity in Times of Crisis.” It was designed with you in mind because we know when things go off-the-rails, sometimes going back to the basics is the most crucial step for not only recovery and protection, but for mitigating risk as well.

Strategies and Resources for Planning and Being Prepared

We took some of the most important topics that are top-of-mind and rolled them up into one neat handbook to help guide you while you are being pressed to do more with less. We understand you immediately jumped to a reactionary mode to enable your remote workers to do their jobs effectively from home. Ensuring you have the required resources, security/data protection, and cloud services in place to facilitate worker productivity is a monumental ask. We tried to make things easy for you to help you prepare for situations like these since our new normal is essentially planning and preparing for crisis as they arise.

In this guidebook, you will find topics related to what you as IT managers are going through. Topics range from:

Get the IT Manager’s Guidebook Now

We hope you take a moment to review the guidebook – download the IT Manager’s Guidebook .

We want to remind you that we can help you meet and exceed your RPO/RTO guidelines and with your object and cold storage needs, saving you power, cooling, and footprint costs. Learn more about our Enterprise Archive and Backup Solutions here .

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Data Protection and Archive Strategies at Your Fingertips

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We had a great turn out last week to our VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event of online sessions where we had an opportunity to discuss some of the latest data trends, challenges, strategies, and tactics needed for processing, storing, and protecting massive volumes of critical enterprise data, which continues to grow even as we are all working remotely. We want to thank our end users, partner community, and attendees for joining us. We thoroughly enjoyed sharing these important and relevant topics and look forward to bringing you more pressing topics again as we evolve and show you how Quantum is innovating.

vqpa blog sessions

How are You Preparing for Massive Data Growth?
Data has not stopped its progression towards those massive growth numbers as predicted by IDC market research, which indicates that about 80% of the world’s data will be unstructured by 2025. We began with our CEO, Jamie Lerner, whose Welcome Keynote set the tone by level setting on where he sees Quantum playing an important role in this unstructured world and how we are currently addressing those challenges head on with object storage . Some of the most pressing topics we discussed was how to prepare for a future where 80% of data is unstructured now so that your organization is not caught unprepared?

How Do You Backup Petabytes of Data? Answer: You Don’t
Another interesting topic had to do with questions that are coming up more and more in our data-driven world is how do you backup petabytes of files? If you didn’t already know the answer to that, it’s you don’t. It was a very interesting concept and highly encourage to check out what our experts are talking about in the context of petabyte/exabyte scenarios.

Reducing Backup Footprint and Spend
In the enterprise backup and archive realm we want to help you meet and exceed your SLAs, so we centered the discussion around Quantum’s high-performance purposely built backup appliances – DXi9000 and DXi4800 – the most dense PBBA out in the market today. With this solution, we’ve been able to help our customers reduce their footprint and spend by consolidating many PBBA’s into a single 10U rackspace totaling 1PB of capacity! When you’re thinking about consolidating without sacrificing performance, Quantum DXi9000 could be the answer you’ve been looking for.

Solving Data Protection Challenges with Veeam and WekaIO
Finally, we invited our partners WekaIO and Veeam to share with us some reference architectures for machine learning at scale and, of course, the ever-important best practice backup rule of 3-2-1-1 . With Veeam, we dove into the backup rule, that is nevertheless so important to protect your data against ransomware . The role of object store in today’s enterprise environments is on everyone’s mind and these open discussions are the best way to learn how you can evaluate and leverage this cool technology and see if it’s the right fit for your growing data needs.

Finally, we shared how to build archive storage at exabyte scale and found a surprising twist to this story and a very interesting topic of discussion among our attendees. With the ever-increasing amounts of data growth in video and video-like data, and all these other topics mentioned, surely there is a session that you will find very interesting, so be sure to check them out.

Watch Session Recordings on Demand
If you missed our VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event, we’ve made all the sessions available for you to watch on demand. Watch recordings now.

To view our Partner blog, click here

A Silver Lining of Innovation

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It is been a long time coming. Two full days of sessions with our valued customers and those interested in our solutions. We’re excited to be hosting VirtualQ I Protect & Archive , a virtual event featuring live keynotes, educational sessions, and technology demonstrations, from June 9-10, 2020. Over the course of two days, we will present on the latest data protection and business continuity developments, as well as host virtual sessions featuring subject-matter experts and technology partners, including Veeam and WekaIO and we hope you can join us!

During this time, you can plan to learn about protecting and preserving your most critical data including:

  • Preparing for a future where 80% of data is unstructured
  • Best practices for backing up and managing immense amounts of data
  • Machine learning at scale (with WekaIO)
  • The role of object storage within Enterprise IT
  • Tactics to protect data from ransomware and cyber threats
  • The latest innovations to come from Quantum’s partnership with Veeam

With all these relevant topics, even during a pandemic like the one we are living through right now, data keeps growing. And there is no better way to face the future where 80% of data is unstructured than preparing for it. Though we stopped going to the office, we have not stopped creating data and, even more so, now that we are working remotely, these end points are creating data at immense speeds and in more ways than one. What is the silver lining in all this? It is driving our engineers to create new technology and enhancing our solutions to perform and deliver on our customer’s needs. The more we are pressed, the more innovation is squeezed out to improve our solutions and services. We are excited to share the latest with you during these sessions.

So, what is Quantum doing to help you? We are innovating. We are adding advanced features that will enable you to securely protect and archive your data cost-effectively whether you chose disk, tape, or object storage. We are driving with performance. Have you checked out the latest performance numbers on our flagship DXi backup appliance? We are also integrating tightly with our technology partners such as WekaIO and Veeam to meet or exceed your service level agreements (SLA’s). The discussion around object store is always an interesting one as organizations are still learning to navigate the murky waters of the cloud, given some of those hidden fees, security hazards, and how it is really meant to be used so that it doesn’t break the bank. Finally, we will discuss the latest ransomware tactics leveraged by criminals and why they are after your backup infrastructure. This and much more, and we hope you can join us.

Register Now. You can register for our virtual sessions at VirtualQ I Protect & Archive .

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