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This Week at the Q

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Today sees the last day of Quantum’s amazing ‘Summer Hours’ program, but I’m getting ‘This Week at the Q’ live before heading out to enjoy it! It’s been wonderful to enjoy every other Friday off over the summer, and spend some time with my kids on our camping adventures!  So for this week’s Top 5 happenings…

1. We’ve been hearing from customers about the need to protect and retain data for decades, and in many cases the need for a ‘forever archive’ or ‘100-year archive’. Couple this with massive growth in unstructured data, and the need to be able to search and analyze this data, and building a modern data archiving strategy has become a key strategy for enterprises. This week, industry expert Fred Moore of Horison Information Strategies joined us on “The Anatomy of a 100-Year Archive for Unstructured Data” to discuss the scale of unstructured data growth, the applications fueling archive requirements, and the anatomy of the 100-year archive enterprises should consider. The replay is available here .

2. Like the webinar? We have a new white paper to go with it! Read “Anatomy of the 100-Year Archive” , by Fred Moore of Horison Information Strategies, to learn when data reaches archival status, data classification guidelines, the role of blocks, files and objects, and the various capabilities that enable an archive for the ages.

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3. Another topic we’re hearing from customers more and more, is ransomware protection. For every ransomware attack we see in the news, there are hundreds of others that don’t get reported. Virus strains and cyber criminals have become increasingly insidious in their attempts to penetrate networks and take control of all digital assets, including backups. A virus cannot bypass a physical barrier formed between your data and the network nor a logical barrier based on data immutability. A solution doesn’t have to be expensive or complex to be effective.  Register for our upcoming live webinar on October 22, “Protect Your Data with a Layered Ransomware Approach.”

4. Having a contingency plan in the event of unforeseen operational disruptions is good business. Whether it’s to deal with the current COVID-19 pandemic or in anticipation of a potential natural disaster, our customers build continuity plans with the technology needed to keep business operations afloat, as well as ensuring employees are trained in using remote working technologies. Quantum’s Diana Salazar covers the “Top Three Data Continuity Techniques Businesses Need to Adopt Now” in her recently published byline in Data Centre Dynamics.

5. We love hosting industry friends at our Executive Briefing Center! It was great to spend time with Philippe Nicolas, founder of Coldago Research and Storage Newsletter editor, in our Englewood, Colorado offices to tour our labs and talk roadmap. So good to start reconnecting in person again, even if we are masked up and touring 6 feet apart!

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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

Archive

Welcome to another entry of ‘This Week at the Q’! The best part of my job is telling our customer stories, and learning about their projects, so this was a fun week with case studies and press releases.

  1. My son has never been so excited as to watch his Dodgers last night! He may be their biggest fan, he bleeds blue, but more I could see some small sense of ‘normalcy’ for him with the return of baseball this week. Which makes this SVG article, “Texas Rangers Open Doors to Globe Life Field with Full-IP Control Room” , well timed, as the new field hosts its first official MLB game today! Read about how our partner, Diversified , worked with the Texas Rangers to integrate the control room for in-venue operations, including Quantum storage. Enjoy watching some ball!
  2. This week, we announced the addition of new multi-factor authentication software to our Scalar® i3 and i6 tape libraries. Read this release for more about how this helps secure critical off-line data against ransomware and other cyber attacks.
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3. TVB Europe ran an article, “Nemeton TV Speeds Up Its Sports Content” . Nemeton TV has produced captivating sports content for major broadcast for over 25 years – including the sport of shinty, which was fun to learn about! Read more to learn about Nemeton TV, some of their prior storage challenges, and how Quantum helped them address the rising demand for streaming services.

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4. Quantum joined the Active Archive Alliance . Our recent acquisition of ActiveScaleTM object storage, combined with our leading tape platforms, strengthens our leadership in active archive infrastructure, and we look forward to adding our voice to this Alliance focused on addressing customer needs to retain and manage large unstructured data sets.

5. Storage Consortium featured Quantum customer, Studio Hamburg, in this article, “Digitization of Archived Media at Studio Hamburg – Postproduction with Quantum Storage” (if you don’t speak German, Google translate at the top right will give you the English version!). On top of a growing volume of high-resolution content, a turning point for Studio Hamburg was a large-scale digitization project. Read more about how they were commissioned to digitize an entire film archive, including about 11,000 hours of 16mm and 35mm film.

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

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

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 .

To view our Partner blog, click here

Tips for Remote Workflow Operations

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Following  VirtualQ | NAB 2020 with Quantum, we were confronted with a number of questions about working remotely in these times of home isolation. We’ve been gathering information from around the globe on this topic since the start of “stay at home” recommendations began. In the Media & Entertainment industry , this caused a flurry of activity to accelerate the remote users’ desktops for high performance applications to provide editing, color correction, VFX, and Animation to a vast number of users, now all located in their homes or some other remote site.

This idea of remote work is not a new idea. Companies have been searching for the holy grail of distributed workloads for years, with the idea of reducing footprints in the machine rooms, as well as in the editorial/colorist bays. The COVID-19 pandemic just accelerated it to the front of the line and to the forefront of everyone’s minds. During VirtualQ | NAB, we provided sessions on remote desktop workflows and high-level reference architecture (as shown in the diagram below). Our intent was to keep it generic, but at the same time, provide our insights and use case-based information as a leader in the Media & Entertainment industry for over 20 years.  

Reviewing Remote Workflow Scenarios

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In consideration of the interest in our sessions and the Q&A that followed, we thought it would be good to provide some additional information, which is consolidated here. There are several things to consider when reviewing remote workflows like cost, security, and performance just to name a few. Scenarios can range from one-to-one desktop connections, to cloud or hybrid cloud where some material sits in the cloud, or applications that are spun up in the cloud, to work on, with the rendered or completed media then passed back to on-prem facilities. Any cloud solution involves additional costs and can range greatly, depending on how you intend to work. There are several leading software companies that are making provisions for remote work styles. The best course-of-action is to contact these providers to examine what they are doing.

For Quantum StorNext customers, we find that these remote workflows do not have to impact the on-premise storage infrastructure. Little to no changes at all need to occur when working remotely with your shared file system. Many of you know the key players in the remote technologies industry, but we felt like it would be beneficial to share some of our knowledge and experiences in this area that we have acquired over many years.

  • For instance, with Teradici , PCoIP windows and Linux, for Macs, you have additional options from Amulet, for GPU support you need Cloud Access software, bundled as Cloud for access with subscription. Also has privacy features with security options. They also have 4K support and dual monitor abilities.
  • Another HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS), free license with HP workstation or licenses can be purchased for other workstations. Client software for only Windows and Linux OS. You can also try a 90-day trial for ZCentral including management software.
  • Some others, ThinLinc , installed either on a single machine or in a cluster configuration, provides access to desktops, data, and software using a client/server configuration, via TigerVNC.
  • TGX , sender only available on Windows and Linux, client available on Windows, Linux and OSX, with 4K support.
  • Bebop allows access to industry tools for editing, 3D modeling and animation, VFX, etc. High level of security, all major cloud provider support.
  • Let’s not forget about some of others that we’ve all used for years: Windows remote desktop, VNC on OSX, tightVNC, TigerVNC, etc.
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Options for Color Accuracy Viewing

If you are looking to get support for SDI output with color grading or editorial workflows, you should check out Sohonets’ Clearview Flex or Pivot. Pivot supports up to 4K HDR in 12bit 4:4:4. Another solution we’ve heard about is Techstream that you may also want to evaluate.

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High-Performance File Transfers

Many of you have been using fast file transfer solutions like Aspera , and Signiant for years, another that comes to mind is Bebop Rocket that may be advantageous if you’re looking for remote workflows.

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VPN Considerations

I think by now most of us use some sort of VPN to secure traffic to and from our facilities. Most of the time this is provided by our IT teams. We’ve talked to several of our customers that had to make a huge investment in expanding their VPN service to support their media-centric locations. Just to name a few: OpenVPN, Cisco AnyConnect , Wireguard , Pulse Secure .

It’s clear to most that each facility has its own workflows and ways of conducting business. If you would like to explore more options for remote workflow operations, please reach out to your local Quantum Representative and we’ll be happy to help provide some answers. You can also work with one our partners to help assist you with your current and future needs with remote workflows.

To view our Partner blog, click here

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.

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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.

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