facebookpixel

Extending Agile, Collaborative Video Editing from Onsite to Cloud with AWS

cloud

Working collaboratively, as a team, in the modern ‘always on, cloud’ age is rarely an ‘on-prem only’ or ‘in the cloud only’ proposition – content workflows, asset handoff and movement all need to shift fluidly from team to team, from high-speed storage onsite to the cloud and back as content creators race to meet deadlines and cope with ever-changing demands.

Quantum’s StorNext File System is used by some of the largest content producers and brands in the world – and most often in a production facility where teams of creatives have the fastest possible connection and the lowest latency signal from editors to producers and content curators and more.

And while the cloud has become an increasingly important way to hand off or retrieve content, agile content creators are realizing the benefit of delivering that same ‘files and folders’, shared storage experience instantly using powerful cloud technologies as well.

Recently, Quantum launched StorNext, the leading high-performance shared storage file system, on Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, making it available as a subscription in the AWS Marketplace. You can learn more about StorNext on AWS here . It makes it faster and simpler for customers to launch an entire shared storage environment on demand that’s ready to use in minutes, enabling simple remote access for collaborative video editing in the cloud.

AWS Marketplace is one of the fastest ways to deploy StorNext shared storage and lets content teams connect from any location to edit video in the cloud as a team. You can speed up post-production workflows by accessing data and collaborating remotely, eliminating the need to copy or transfer files between users.

It’s a powerful new tool to help augment and amplify the work of physical StorNext deployments with a hybrid onsite and cloud solution, and part of evolving, increasingly global content production strategy.

Here are some of the key benefits to building an agile workflow powered by StorNext on AWS:

  • Launch a complete StorNext shared storage environment when needed, then spin it down when it’s no longer needed. Choose from a range of shared storage sizes, launch it within the AWS management console, and creative team members around the world can access the new shared storage in minutes.
  • Users can access data and collaborate from anywhere with no need to copy files between users. Since there’s no specialized connector or physical access needed, users can connect to their team’s shared storage from anywhere they happen to be—on location, in the field, or at home—yet still have the full StorNext managed, shared storage service as if they were working together in the same facility.
  • Works seamlessly for users and applications expecting a file and folder interface. StorNext on AWS is StorNext, so users can browse and manage files together in a familiar files and folders interface to speed and organize your team’s work.
  • Use powerful StorNext services to extend and unite your workflows. Move raw content in—and finished content out—of your StorNext in the cloud instance with powerful file movement and orchestration tools FlexSync and FlexTier as part of your evolving content production and management operations.

Learn more about StorNext on AWS

Visit our StorNext on AWS webpage , read the Solution Brief , or go directly to the StorNext on AWS Marketplace page .

Listen in on the joint Quantum and AWS to dive into more detail on the solution and see workflow examples of how you can use it.

Listen Now

The post Extending Agile, Collaborative Video Editing from Onsite to Cloud with AWS appeared first on Quantum Blog .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Considering Using Cloud for Video Surveillance Data? Novaira Research May Influence Your Thinking

cloud

Quantum recently worked with Novaira Insights to publish a white paper that provides insight into the state of the video surveillance market and helpful factors for deciding between on-premises and cloud storage.

Here are a few of the highlights:

  • Increasing number of cameras and resolutions and longer retention times are all driving up storage demands. In addition, the growing use of video analytics is placing more demand on storage systems.
  • When considering cloud or on-prem, all of these factors can play into choosing and designing the right solution.

The Appeal of the Cloud is Simplicity and Flexibility

For many security departments, their current infrastructure is probably using a large number of Network Video Recording servers (NVRs) , to record their data. As camera counts and resolutions increase, they are adding more NVRs until it becomes costly and difficult to manage.

The appeal of the cloud is the simplicity and flexibility it provides as a platform; however, using the cloud introduces new challenges like latency (which can cause frame loss), data security and control, and unpredictable costs.

Modernize Your Video Surveillance Infrastructure – Choose the Right Solution for You

Novaira Insights explores the many flexible paths for deciding between on-premises and cloud storage including:

  • Options for utilizing cloud in video surveillance: cloud-based services, on-prem cloud, or a hybrid solution. 
  • Factors for choosing the right solution when considering cloud or on-premises.
  • End-user and integrator benefits using on-prem private cloud or a hybrid solution.
  • How an HCI platform provides simplicity and flexibility without introducing risk or giving up control.

The white paper makes the point that a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform can be a good step toward cloud, providing the simplicity and flexibility of the cloud, without introducing risk of frame loss and without giving up control.

Quantum has helped many organizations with mission-critical video surveillance replace racks of NVRs with a simple, resilient platform that can record 10’s of thousands of cameras and run other physical security and analytics applications as well. If you are looking to modernize your video surveillance infrastructure, check out this white paper and let’s talk! You can download the white paper here .

The post Considering Using Cloud for Video Surveillance Data? Novaira Research May Influence Your Thinking appeared first on Quantum Blog .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Simple, Agile Collaborative Video Editing in the Cloud – StorNext Now Available on AWS

cloud

Many organizations have looked at integrating cloud services for individual production workflow steps – yet, building a truly collaborative environment for remote and hybrid teams without copying files back and forth has proven difficult and costly.

Now, we give you StorNext –the leading high-performance shared storage file system–on Amazon’s AWS infrastructure, and available as a subscription in the AWS Marketplace. It makes it faster and simpler for you to launch an entire shared storage environment on demand that’s ready to use in minutes, enabling simple remote access for collaborative video editing in the cloud.

AWS Marketplace is one of the fastest ways to deploy StorNext shared storage and lets your content teams connect from any location to edit video in the cloud as a team. You can speed up post-production workflows by accessing data and collaborating remotely, eliminating the need to copy or transfer files between users.

It’s a powerful new tool to help augment and amplify the work of your physical StorNext deployments with a hybrid on-site and cloud solution, and part of your evolving, increasingly global content production strategy.

Here are some of the key benefits to building an agile workflow powered by StorNext on AWS:

Launch your environment when you need it, spin it down when you don’t. Choose your configuration and amount of storage needed and launch it within the AWS management console. Your users can access the new shared storage in minutes.

Users can access data and collaborate from anywhere with no need to copy files between users. Since there’s no specialized connector or physical access needed, users can connect to their team’s shared storage from anywhere they happen to be—on location, in the field, or at home—yet still have the full StorNext managed, shared storage service as if they were working together in the same facility.

Works seamlessly for users and applications expecting a file and folder interface. StorNext on AWS is StorNext, so users can browse and manage files together in a familiar files and folders interface to speed and organize your team’s work.

Use powerful StorNext services to extend and unite your workflows. Move raw content in—and finished content out—of your StorNext in the cloud instance with powerful file movement and orchestration tools FlexSync and FlexTier as part of your evolving content production and management operations.

Learn more about StorNext on AWS

Visit our StorNext on AWS webpage , read the Solution Brief , or go directly to the StorNext on AWS Marketplace page .

Join us for our upcoming webinar with AWS on September 22nd (or watch on-demand thereafter) to dive into more detail on the solution and see workflow examples of how you can use it.

Register Now

The post Simple, Agile Collaborative Video Editing in the Cloud – StorNext Now Available on AWS appeared first on Quantum Blog .

To view our Partner blog, click here

AWS Outposts Meets ActiveScale Object Storage

ActiveScale

Today is another great day for ActiveScale Object Storage . We are pleased to announce that ActiveScale is now AWS Outposts Ready .  This designation, part of the AWS Service Ready program, validates ActiveScale object storage systems in AWS Outposts deployments to provide Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) compliant services for AWS services running within an AWS Outposts environment. 

WHAT AND WHY AWS OUTPOSTS? 

AWS Outposts is a service offering first introduced in 2019 that offers AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools within your own datacenter. In effect, the AWS cloud comes to you,- through a fully configured, rack-based system environment deployed in your own data center, co-location facility, or hosted IT environment. Consistent with AWS services in the AWS cloud, and as trending in the industry today across multiple platform vendors, AWS Outposts is sold and managed by AWS as a fully managed service.  

AWS Outposts provides a hybrid cloud solution that is fully compatible and integrates with your IT resources deployed in the AWS cloud. As an on-premises solution, AWS Outposts is particularly well suited for workloads that require: 

  • low latency access to on-premises systems,  
  • local data processing due to dependencies on in-house resources or constraints, or 
  • data residency in a specific geography or security domain. 

WHY ACTIVESCALE AND QUANTUM OBJECT STORAGE SERVICES 

ActiveScale is an ideal solution for AWS Outposts as it provides industry-leading scalability, data durability, and total cost of ownership (TCO), enabled by its unique ability to cost-effectively manage both active and cold data. ActiveScale Dynamic Data Placement (DDP) incorporates advanced erasure coding and real-time algorithms to optimally place data securely across the entire ActiveScale system. DDP not only guards against data loss, component, and site failures, but also optimizes system performance. 

THE EMERGENCE OF THE AGILE DATA CENTER 

The increasing adoption of AWS Outposts, and recent designation of ActiveScale as an AWS Outposts Ready solution, reflect growing interest by enterprises and cloud services providers alike to adopt hybrid cloud and as-a-Service data center strategies as they evolve their infrastructures into the future. Large organizations are choosing as-a-Service solutions for their financial flexibility, agility, and simple consumption models. As another data point, note that analyst firm, IDC, predicts that Data-Center-Infrastructure-as-a-Service (DCIaaS) revenues will grow from $138M in 2020 to a whopping $14B in 2025 at a growth rate of 151.8% annually.1  Service offerings from major IT system suppliers, such as HPE Greenlake and Dell Technologies Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service, also reflect this trend.  

The growing demand for on-premises data center services is consistent with Quantum’s own aggressive development of Quantum-as-a-Service solutions, for example, with our recent introduction of Quantum Object Storage Services  (QOSS). Based on ActiveScale platforms, Quantum Object Storage Services provide affordable, scalable on-prem private cloud storage services for both active and archived data sets. In this deployment scenario, Quantum owns, installs, manages, maintains, and monitors your private ActiveScale infrastructure, delivered as-a-Service, backed by Quantum expertise, service delivery tools, and AIOps-driven analytics and monitoring. Scalable from petabytes to exabytes, QOSS meets the growing demands of large enterprises, government agencies, cloud service providers and research organizations for more dynamic and flexible IT consumption models. 

The post AWS Outposts Meets ActiveScale Object Storage appeared first on Quantum Blog .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Meet the New ActiveScale: Dynamic Capacity for Dynamic Growth – Take Your Data Storage from Terabytes to Exabytes

ActiveScale

Our world is being digitized at a dizzying rate. Unstructured data, such as entertainment videos, surveillance, weather, and geospatial data – is growing at up to 60% per year, and it is projected to comprise 80% of all data on the planet by 2025. Today, the amount stored is already approaching 150 zettabytes (IDC, 2020) while growing by the minute. This staggering growth is coming from a variety of sources, including video production, satellite imagery, telemetry, web-scale applications, gene sequencing, and IoT sensors, just to name a few.

Unstructured data sets are huge and often reach petabytes to even exabytes in size, making the classic NAS and SAN storage architectures unable to store and manage them. And, today’s data not only needs to be stored and protected; it also needs to be accessible by the people who need it, when they need it. Scientists, creative professionals, and business analysts each need immediate and ongoing access to their data from which to gain new insights and to monetize its underlying value.

UNLIMITED SCALABILITY

On June 24, Quantum made a significant announcement to address the demanding requirements to support unstructured data as we unveiled the latest generation of ActiveScale object storage software and systems – namely, ActiveScale 6.0 software and the new ActiveScale X200 platform. Together, they provide unlimited scalability in terms of capacity, object count, and performance, while ActiveScale’s unequalled data durability, system availability, and data security are not sacrificed.

NO REBALANCING REQUIRED

The ActiveScale 6.0 scale-out software architecture is key to achieving robust scalability. With ActiveScale, you can seamlessly expand your compute, networking, and storage resources to easily address increasing workloads. ActiveScale Dynamic Data Placement (DDP) incorporates advanced erasure encoding, data encryption, and real-time heuristics to optimally place data securely across the entire ActiveScale cluster. DDP not only guards against data loss, component, and site failures, but also optimizes total system throughput across the cluster. DDP essentially prevents the intrusive data rebalancing that plagues many other object storage systems and inhibits their scalability in real-life scenarios.

HIGH DENSITY INFRASTRUCTURE

The ActiveScale X200 object storage platform is a new converged system. It combines the latest generation of high-density, high-capacity servers with the latest ActiveScale software advancements. When compared with our previous generation X100, a 3-module X200 cluster fits in an equivalent data center rack, providing:

  • 78% greater storage density (14.6 PB raw)
  • Up to 7X greater sustained throughput (51 GB/sec)
  • 6X more objects (30B)

Consolidating this much capacity and computing power in the same floor space significantly reduces operational costs, while also delivering greater access and performance. Plus, by seamlessly adding additional X200 modules, capacity, performance, and object count can be expanded as data grows. (Note also that current customers benefit with the ability to expand their existing ActiveScale clusters with the X200 new platform)!

THE ACTIVESCALE PORTFOLIO

To put this in perspective with our expanded portfolio, ActiveScale can now be deployed for as small as a few 100 terabytes and as large as 100 exabytes and beyond, all within a single, easy-to-use system.

X200 blog

In other exciting news, in addition to ActiveScale X200 being available through Quantum and our stellar partner network, ActiveScale 6.0 software is now available through Supermicro and their resellers when bundled with qualified Supermicro servers. To learn more, click here .

MEET THE NEW ACTIVESCALE

Learn more about ActiveScale 6.0 and its rich feature set, plus the new X200 platform.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Roaring Back – Collaboration, Creativity, and Flow

cloud

No doubt about it – creatives have battled through a year of disruption, with some hard ‘lessons learned’ in a short period of time about how to get their creative work delivered with more remote team members and ever-changing workflows – all while rising to the challenge of unprecedented content demand . 

Above all, creative teams have learned how resilient they can be and how to deliver no matter what’s going on–after all the ‘show’ must go on. Most customers were able to keep at least a small pilot team of creatives that worked with high-resolution content in their facility, while incorporating remote team-member contributions and making full use of proxy workflows. But there is clearly a tremendous pent-up demand to get back to full, ‘pedal to the metal’ production and truly harness the creative vision of creative teams to deliver their best work, faster. 

Like most things creative – building an environment to support the creative ‘flow’ that is as frictionless as possible is critical. 

StorNext – Designed for Collaboration and Workflow Fit 

StorNext  has always been developed and deployed with a mission to give users a truly collaborative, frictionless workflow from a file sharing and storage perspective; by empowering teams of content producers to all mount the same storage volumes natively on their workstations or servers for extraordinary read and write performance and lowest latency – in other words, ideal for multiple users accessing multiple, very high-resolution streams of video as with film or television production projects.  

And since StorNext can combine shared storage from different types of storage platforms in a complete, end-to-end management workflow, it can be easily tuned to deliver more performance where your users need it by scaling out, or adding NVMe storage  for truly eye-popping performance – or tuned to deliver economical storage at the largest scale. 

StorNext 7 – the Newest Advancement Gives You Even More Creative Choice 

Now, with the newest evolution of StorNext 7, where StorNext’s software services are containerized and delivered on Quantum’s H4000 Storage Appliance  – you can now take the full capability of StorNext into more places than ever before, giving you another dimension of ‘frictionless workflow’ that let’s you shift where you place your collaborative environment. 

Here are some examples: 

  1. Level Up to Truly Collaborative Storage: If you’ve been using a patchwork of solutions to move files around, other shared storage, or a NAS system that isn’t designed for large files with world-class video streaming performance , or just making do with a patchwork of older storage – you can have the full capability of StorNext racked and running in minutes to get your entire team working together at speed on a system that is ready to grow as fast as your business does. 
     
  1. Add More Capability with Precision: If you’re already using StorNext – you can quickly stand up more capability in a new department, office, or city without waiting to add more storage or infrastructure to your main StorNext environment – letting you take on new projects quickly and deliver them faster. 
     
  1. Take StorNext with You: When you can have a collaborative environment and storage in such a small footprint – you can explore taking your trusted StorNext environment into new places beyond your main facility – to produce live events on location or bring more ‘post-production’ closer to the set for camera ingest, DIT, special effects visualization, or more. 

We Can’t Wait to Hear You ‘Roar’ 

So, as you’re mapping out how to truly build the most creative environment for your team and get that production edge, reach out to your Quantum Value Added Reseller or your Quantum Representative to review your workflow – we can’t wait to hear about what you create! 

Join Our Live Talk – June 22, 2021 

Join us for our live talk – Collaboration Just Got Easier – on June 22 where we’ll discuss how to build a collaborative workflow quickly and the deployment scenarios outlined above in more detail.  

Register for Live Talk Now  

To view our Partner blog, click here