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VirtualQ I Transform Recap: Helping you Unlock the Value of Unstructured Data

ActiveScale

As we head into the holiday season, it’s a good time to recap some of the major things we’ve introduced this year, and in many ways our recent VirtualQ I Transform event was the culmination of a years’ worth of effort in bringing new products and solutions to market. 

In November, our VirtualQ I Transform event focused on how unstructured data growth, and unlocking the business value in this data, is transforming how our customers think about data. This event was the culmination of our launch efforts of the expanded portfolio we announced on November 10 – focused on managing, storing, and protecting unstructured data across its lifecycle. You can access all of the sessions and watch at your convenience here .

Most Popular Topics During VirtualQ I Transform

Based on the hundreds of attendees across many different sessions hosted over two days (one European event, and one event for the Americas), here are some of the topics that resonated most and generated the most interest:

Unstructured Data Sprawl: Many of our customers are outgrowing their capacity and looking at new ways to manage ‘unstructured data sprawl.’  We are helping these customers gain better visibility into what data they have, where it lives, and automate ways to move data between edge, core, and cloud environments. The new automated data movement we’ve added to StorNext 7 and ATFS can help in this regard, and were two of the key things we introduced. 

ATFS Storage Platform: There were many questions about our new ATFS storage platform, an easy to use, cost effective NAS platform with integrated data classification. This data classification is a major advancement in giving customers visibility into the file data they are storing.  With simple queries, customers can gain new insights into the make-up of their file data, where it lives, and then quickly use those insights to drive actions that can be enforced with data placement policies, data protection policies, and storage quotas. 

ATFS Trial Download: As we mentioned during our event, for anyone interested in learning more about the ATFS platform, and to start to classify the file data you have today, download a full version of ATFS here . It only takes a few minutes, and you can start to see the impact this platform can make to your NAS infrastructure.

Ransomware Protection: There was also a lot of interest in new ways and best practices to protect against ransomware, and security of data in general. This continues to be top of mind for many of our customers, and we now have options to protect against ransomware regardless of your technology choice, and regardless of the application you are using. We’ve introduced Object Lock to our ActiveScale object store software , we are adding a similar snapshot retention lock feature to our DXi backup appliances , and tape remains the most secure storage with innate air-gapped protection, Active Vault software to automatically move tapes to an in-library vault, and security capabilities like AES-256-bit encryption and multi-factor authentication.

“Forever” Data Archives: Lastly, there was continued interest in the emerging realization that much of this valuable data being created and analyzed will need to be kept forever in a private cloud. Our solutions for this “forever” data archive continue to drive interest, from object storage software with erasure encoding, to RAIL tape, to ways to index and search the content in these archives. Look for some exciting announcements in this area in the coming weeks and months. You can check out the “Forever Archive” white paper here .

Looking Ahead

We are continuing to innovate and transform our own business with a focus on solving our customers’ most pressing business challenges in the areas of video, digital images, and other forms of unstructured data, and we can’t wait for 2021! 

Watch VirtualQ I Transform Sessions On-Demand

If you missed the event, watch replays at your own pace to learn more about managing, storing, and protecting unstructured data across its lifecycle.

Watch Sessions On-Demand Now!

To view our Partner blog, click here

This Week at the Q

ActiveScale

Welcome to another entry of ‘This Week at the Q’ and our top 5 highlights.

  1. With our recently announced ActiveScaleTM Object Lock feature for data immutability, your data can be protected from malicious acts such as data deletion, relocation, and ransomware. We now have a new video explaining how this works – watch here !
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2. And for more advice to proactively combat the onslaught of ransomware attacks and the elements needed for a solid data protection plan, read more in this Security Magazine blog, “End the vicious ransomware cycle.”

3. Quantum will be at Tech Field Day on December 9th, from 8-10am PT! This event brings together a group of technical influencers and experts to explore the technical underpinnings and architectures of invited vendors. If you want to learn more about our ActiveScale object storage for private cloud, the event is live streamed and you can follow along live via Twitter @TechFieldDay or online during the time slots below:

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Time (PT) Section Speaker
8:00AM Quantum Company Overview Ed Fiore, General Manager
8:20AM ActiveScale Object Storage Intro Thomas Demoor, Lead Architect
9:00AM ActiveScale Layered Architecture  Thomas Demoor, Lead Architect
9:20 AM ActiveScale Product Summary Thomas Demoor, Lead Architect
9:30AM ActiveScale Product Demo Sherman Schorzman, Technical Marketing Engineer

4. We also recently launched our all-new All-Terrain File System, ATFS. Hear from early customer, The Hormel Institute, University of MN, about how they accelerated cancer research and improved ROI using ATFS’s zero-touch data classification and automated policies for data mobility. Read their case study here.

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5. And one more ATFS case study! The production experts at 5 guys named Moe had challenges ingesting multiple tapes (assume tape equals a movie or season episode) in parallel, tracking the progress of data through the workflow stages, and managing resources for productivity. Read their case study here to see how Quantum ATFS data insights and automation meet storage needs for productivity and profitability improvements.

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Leave a comment if there are topics you’d like to see added to our weekly top 5 happenings!

Natasha

To view our Partner blog, click here

This Week at the Q

ActiveScale

Welcome to another entry of ‘This Week at the Q’ and our top 5 highlights. It’s been a busy week continuing the product announcements from our expanded portfolio!

1. Continuing on the news from last week’s launch of our new expanded portfolio – covered here in Blocks & Files – this week we announced more details around our next-gen StorNext® 7 high-performance file system and ActiveScaleTM object storage advancements.

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2. This new byline by Matt Dewey on “Managing Complex Object Stores” just published in Disaster Recovery Journal. Object stores have found a home in the cloud and in data centers, becoming the repository for long-lived and high-value data. Read more here to learn about use cases for object storage, its advantages in key markets, as well as some of the challenges it can present and what to consider.

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3. We enjoyed connecting with the high-performance computing community this week at the virtual SC20 event. If we missed you, you can still check out this video interview we did with InsideHPC, “At Virtual SC20: Quantum Corp. Takes on High Performance Storage of Unstructured Data.”

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4. Check out this new blog post, “Cyber Insurance Market is Evolving Due to Ransomware Demands.” You can learn how the cyber security insurance market is evolving amidst an increase in ransomware demands and payments. Insurance companies are starting to move the risk over to subscribers, requiring stricter controls. Read more here.

cyber insurance

5. One of the reasons I love working at Quantum is the culture and the people I get to work with every day, and it is most definitely an honor to work with Liz King! Get to know Quantum’s CRO a little more in this new Authority Magazine article, ”Women of the C-Suite: Liz King of Quantum.”

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Leave a comment if there are topics you’d like to see added to our weekly top 5 happenings!

Natasha

To view our Partner blog, click here

Re-Imagining Quantum’s Portfolio for Managing Unstructured Data

ActiveScale

This week, we made a significant announcement, introducing an expanded portfolio focused on classifying, managing, and protecting unstructured data across its lifecycle. The new products we introduced represent another significant step in our vision to lead in video and unstructured data solutions and represent a key shift in focus from ‘storing’ data to ‘managing’ data. 

Accelerating Data Growth, Data Movement, and Use of Hybrid- and Multi-Cloud

Our customers are dealing with massive unstructured data sprawl – video, digital images, and other forms of unstructured data are growing by 30-60% per year. Many of our customers have millions or billions of files and lack visibility into what they have, and where it lives. This lack of visibility combined with the velocity of data growth is putting pressure on infrastructure costs and forcing companies to rethink infrastructure designs. 

At the same time, the COVID pandemic has resulted in permanent changes to the workforce, driving more data movement (between edge / core / cloud), and an acceleration in the adoption of hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud. The emergence of AI and machine learning techniques provide new tools to leverage this data, and is also driving new lifecycle and ‘workflow’ requirements for this data, including a desire to preserve and protect this data and keep it accessible for decades. 

All of this adds up to what we see as the key challenge facing our customers in this decade – how to unlock business value out of all of this data, and manage this data across the entire multi-decade lifecycle of this data.

Manage Unstructured Data, Across Any Workload, End-to-End with Quantum

Our expanded portfolio can help our customers tackle this challenge, starting with new ways to classify and manage data across its lifecycle, for any workload, end-to-end. This expanded portfolio is depicted and summarized below:

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The new announcements include:

  • New ways to visualize, automate, and purposefully place data, with Quantum’s All-Terrain File System (ATFS) , a next-gen storage platform targeted at the NAS market. 
  • StorNext 7 :  The latest version of Quantum’s high-performance file system, for high throughput low-latency workloads. StorNext 7 introduces new features like file system pools that optimize the use of NVMe for production storage, as well as new ways to program and manage the file system.
  • An expanded ActiveScale object storage portfolio , including a new 3-node object storage system, object lock to protect against ransomware, and small object aggregation to improve the performance of small objects.

Lastly, all of these new offerings are available on a capacity basis, with new all-inclusive software licensing that aligns our licensing with the value we are delivering to customers. 

We look forward to engaging with customers and partners on this expanded portfolio – to learn more, please register for our VirtualQ I Transform event where we will be showcasing all of these new solutions.

To view our Partner blog, click here