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Content’s High-Water Mark: Making Content Production and Collaboration Easier

CMMA Blog

Most people are aware that global video consumption grew over 60% last year1 – not only for ‘binge-worthy’ and immersive film, TV, and animation on our favorite streaming services, but in every aspect of our lives—video has truly become our new normal as the most effective way to entertain, teach, and connect with customers. 

Producers of that content are scrambling to produce and deliver in this new content gold rush – in North America alone OTT revenue is expected to double to $94B by 2026. And beyond the endless demand for television and film production, growth is hitting rates never seen before: the gaming market is expected to nearly double from $192 to $398 Billion by 2027 – and, as AR and VR hits its stride, it is expected to quadruple from $37 to $127 Billion by 2034. 

Clearly, with so much demand for new content, and so much competition – thinking about how to build a flexible and reliable production workflow, how to keep your raw and finished content and archives available everywhere you need it, and how to let your creative team work together to speed production time is critical. 

StorNext 7 – Containerized and Virtualized 

Quantum’s StorNext  shared storage file system and management platform has long been trusted to help customers build these workflows in the largest environments and meet the extreme needs of hundreds of creatives all editing and finishing content on storage at the same time – and all with content archives easily reaching Petabytes. 

With the release of StorNext 7, the StorNext platform has taken a dramatic architectural step forward. We took the functionality of StorNext—that previously was provided by multiple hardware components, software, and network connection integration points— into virtualized software containers that are incredibly fast to deploy, configure, and update. 

 
StorNext 7 on the New Quantum H4000 

Today, we’re making all of this technology available on the new Quantum H4000 converged storage appliance – a complete StorNext shared-storage environment that fits in only 2 rack units – and is ready to deploy anywhere you’d like your team to work. 

Collaborative Content Production and Management Just Got Easier 

Together – StorNext 7 and H4000 will help content creators everywhere with the ability to quickly stand up a new shared storage environment designed for large video files, so that your entire team can work at full speed with their favorite solutions without copying files back and forth or waiting for one team to checkpoint before another team can get started. With StorNext 7 and H4000:  

  • You have the full capability of StorNext technology at your disposal to move content to tape or cloud and quickly retrieve content whenever your team needs it. 
  • Existing StorNext customers can now precisely deploy more StorNext capability wherever needed – for new projects that they couldn’t ramp up to tackle before, or easily expand to new locations. 
  • And speaking of locations – StorNext 7 and the H4000 are fast to deploy for live event production, for remote production teams that want to bring collaboration with them, or even serve camera ingest or VFX workflows. 
  • With options to customize your H4000 for up to 307 Terabytes of storage, and your choice of a mix of up to 100 GigE or 32 Gb Fibre Channel connections you can get up and running quickly in every environment.  
  • As your production needs grow, expanding your system is incredibly simple too – you can add more H4000 systems for greater performance, or storage expansion systems to add more capacity, or even connect to Quantum’s H2000 or F1000 and F2000 NVMe storage as well. 

Together, the new StorNext 7 and the H4000 are ready to help you build a truly collaborative foundation to meet even your most ambitious content delivery plans and schedules. In summary, content production and collaboration just got easier.  

See how to make your content production and collaboration easier here .  

SOURCES: 

  1. Nielsen – “Nielsen studies show that home-bound consumers have led to a 60% increase in the amount of video content watched globally.” https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2020/covid-19-tracking-the-impact-on-media-consumption/ 
     
  2. Digital TV Research, as reported in Digital EV Europe – “The US, which is the world’s most mature OTT market and home to the world’s leading SVOD services, will see revenues more than double despite its maturity.” https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2021/03/01/north-american-ott-market-to-double-in-revenue-by-2026/ 
     
  3. 360 Research Reports: Global Gaming Market Size, Status and Forecast 2021-2027 – “The global Gaming market size is projected to reach US$ 398950 million by 2027, from US$ 192150 million in 2020, at a CAGR of 11.0% during 2021-2027.” https://www.360researchreports.com/global-gaming-market-17720853  (reported in MarketWatch here: https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/2021-2027-global-gaming-market-development-plans-emerging-demand-healthy-cagr-industry-share-leading-players-strategy-drivers-and-opportunity-outlook-360-research-report-2021-04-23 ) 
     
  4. Prescient and Strategic Intelligence – AR and VR Market – Global Industry Analysis and Growth Forecast to 2030 – “The augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) market size was $37.0 billion in 2019, and it is expected to reach $1,274.4 billion in 2030, while progressing at a CAGR of 42.9% during 2020–2030.” https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/augmented-reality-and-virtual-reality-market  

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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:

atfs graphic

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.

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This Week at the Q

cloud

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

1. We have some great new explainer videos highlighting some key features of our ActiveScaleTM software that ensure data availability and integrity with a hands-off experience. Intelligent Dynamic Data Placement (DDP) and Dynamic Data Repair (DDR) are key to data’s long-term viability by monitoring data health and providing repair when errors are discovered. Learn more about DDP here and DDR here .

2. Customer success is always a favorite highlight in our week! This week we feature Canal Extremadura in Spain. As they made the transformation from a traditional radio and TV business to a modern multimedia corporation, they also needed to revamp a complex and aging IT infrastructure. Quantum collaborated and provided the content access and scalability needed for an evolving business.  Read more in Canal Extremadura’s case study here .

canal

3. Check out this new case study from our partner, Chesa. Cortina Productions, located in the DC metro area, designs and produces multimedia experiences for museums, cultural institutions, visitor centers, and aquariums across the world. With 4D theaters, and AR and VR experiences, they’re on the forefront of technology. We’re proud to have partnered with Chesa to help manage Cortina’s data more efficiently and with improved accessibility to support their more complex projects and rapid growth.

4. Want to run a cloud-based application against data that StorNext® has stored in the cloud? Need access to that data from other sites? Looking to share files with business partners via the cloud? It’s all possible! Read more in this new blog from Dan Duperron.

5. Did you miss our pumpkin carving event? Learn from the master pumpkin carver from Maniac Pumpkin Carvers. You can check out the replay here – and enter our contest by posting your photos with hashtag #QuantumTransformedPumpkins. We will announce winners on social media!

quantum pumpkin image

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

Natasha

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Our New “Remote” World

CMMA Blog

As always, I want to begin by expressing my sincerest wishes that this blog finds you all well. Very likely you are working remotely, like me. Like most. It’s our new world. In fact, recently we held our first very large virtual event, VirtualQ | NAB . It was focused on the Media and Entertainment industry with special interest for our Broadcast and Post-Production customers. Hopefully, you were able to attend one of the many sessions we offered over this 3-day event, which included discussions with technology Partners like Adobe , Dalet , IPV , and Teradici . If you missed any of these sessions, you can still check them out here . We were thrilled to have them share updates on their offerings, especially as they relate to new workflows that have now become intrinsic with remote collaboration, a change that has become more prevalent and is likely here to stay.

To me, this was the most recurring and central theme to what people were both talking and asking about. We also heard that at the beginning of our “remote-work” world, there was an initial scramble by companies who found their teams scattered and isolated from each other, who still required access to shared media resources to meet business objectives. The initial frenzy has mostly come and gone. Many studio and media production companies have adjusted by using new methods to access and share content, distribute it, and keep the entire workflow moving in order to maintain business continuity and monetize the final product.

I was lucky enough to speak with the following 4 partners during our event, and throughout I heard the constant theme of facilitating workflows and production in this new era of home studios and remote media projects. Here are a few of my takeaways that underscore this, and the new world of remote collaboration.

Adobe presented Productions in Premiere Pro that provides users the tools for organizing collaborative workflows and film projects. Productions was demonstrated with a virtual desktop interface and showed how remote users can access local storage, like StorNext , for shared project workflows.

Dalet shared how distributed resources, teams, and audiences are everywhere now. Cumulatively, this has necessitated the ability for remote creatives to take advantage of their offerings, which include cloud and hybrid cloud content access to maintain uninterrupted productivity.

We also heard how IPV is helping facilitate workflow and productivity in today’s world that’s relying on remote access like never before. IPV’s Curator provides the ability to ‘collaborate without borders’, enabling ongoing creative work from anywhere in the world.

Teradici provided us with a demonstration that showed how remote users, in your own home studio, for instance, can seamlessly maintain business continuity with ongoing access to workstations and applications. This is especially valuable for scenarios when moving everything to the cloud isn’t feasible, yet remote teams need ongoing access to shared assets to complete projects and meet deadlines.

It was truly exciting to hear how these partners are advancing technologies to facilitate and create new remote workflows and keep decentralized operations connected and productive. During our sessions, we heard that for the most part, the M&E industry has rapidly adjusted, with editors, colorists, producers, and collaborative workgroups working remotely and continuing production in “the new normal.” In fact, many already believe that remote workflows will continue, and with new resulting advantages. We’ll look at those in another blog, though.

The next step, of course, is to drill down into these new media workflows , and see the architecture, what capabilities users will have, and the simplicity to integrate these new methods into your own workflow. For these details, I invite you to stay tuned for the upcoming blog by my colleague, Everett Ward, where he’ll cover these workflows from a more technical perspective. Until my next blog, stay safe, happy, and healthy!

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Quantum’s VirtualQ | NAB – Take Your Content in Bold New Directions

CMMA Blog

First of all, we at Quantum want to say we miss interacting with you personally, whether providing demos , tours, direct access with our executives at our Executive Briefing Center in our Englewood CO office, visiting onsite to understand your environment and challenges first-hand, or simply having really good conversations during any of the events we both attend, we are all adjusting to new ways. With that said, we are still conducting all these customer-focused activities, but more creatively, virtually. 

And to underscore the core aspect, which hasn’t changed over these recent times of adjustment, is our commitment to our customers and finding new means to continue our interaction, and solving the challenges to keep your production rolling along. 

We might not have made our annual trip to Vegas this year for NAB to sit across from each other at the same table to talk about what’s new, but we can still have meaningful conversations and learning forums face-to-face, virtually that is!

Beginning next Tuesday, May 12 – 14, we are thrilled to welcome you back to the Quantum booth, specifically to our VirtualQ | N AB !

As always, Quantum executives and business leaders will be participating in break-out customer meetings to have personal roundtable discussions. We’ll also be showcasing many of our advanced technologies with product updates and an impressive lineup of leading technology Partners whose time-relevant solutions work seamlessly with StorNext ® environments. Listed below are the sessions where you can join from the comfort of your own home office to hear directly from these Quantum Technology Alliances Partners on how they are providing innovative methods to keep your workflows in motion in our “new normal” world.

  • Adobe Premier Productions with StorNext
    • Learn more about Adobe Premiere Pro as we highlight its new Productions feature and the ways to configure StorNext to get the most out of this new capability.
  • Orchestrated Media Solutions with Dalet and StorNext
    • Find out how Dalet’s solutions provide access across tiered-storage systems along with transparent Archive content access for quicker restores and faster time-to-air.
  • Remote Collaborative Production with IPV and StorNext
    • Hear how IPV helps efficiently manage today’s fast-moving collaborative media workflows and creative projects for today’s distributed workstation environments.
  • Options and Considerations for Effective Remote Production with Teradici and StorNext
    • Discover how Teradici enables work from home needs with remote technology to create secure virtual workspaces handling even the most graphics-intensive applications.

If you would like to learn more about these solutions and how they can help keep your production environment in motion, please visit our VirtualQ | NAB Event web page to check out our event agenda and register for the sessions that interest you. Also, if you would like to connect directly with Quantum executives, product leadership, and engineering experts, please let us know , and we’ll be happy to arrange a meeting with you. See you virtually next weekat VirtualQ | NAB!

To view our Partner blog, click here

Tips and Best Practices for Remote Media Production and Post-Production

CMMA Blog

To our valued customers, we know this pandemic is affecting everyone on both a personal and professional level.  We have been working closely with partners to enable editors and producers to do their work remotely, and we’d like to share some of the practices we are seeing, below.

If you would like to learn more or if you need assistance, please contact us so we can help.  We will continue to stay in touch during this difficult time.

Options and Best Practices for Enabling Remote Post-Production

There are several options for enabling remote production, but the most common practice we are seeing is to leverage virtual and/or remote desktop technology to give content creators access to their shared storage environment remotely. 

In this architecture, our customers leverage their workstations and shared storage environment that is in place at the studio or post-house.  These workstations are connected to the high-performance shared storage environment via a StorNext file system client, or a standard CIFS or NFS client.  For our existing customers, this entire infrastructure is in place today. 

Virtual desktop and/or remote desktop technology is then used to enable remote access to these high-performance workstations.  From the user’s perspective, the experience of work on an ‘endpoint’ computer at their home is the same as if they were working at their workstation at the studio.  There are different technology options, and Quantum and our partners will consult with customers to determine the right architecture, and work with customers to deploy the remote desktop infrastructure using the best options and architecture for their needs. 

Benefits

This approach has the benefits of leveraging the existing storage infrastructure in place today and doesn’t require that the data be moved.  It can be implemented very quickly, with some of our customers enabling hundreds of editors in the span of just a couple of weeks.

Remote Production Session at Virtual Q | NAB

If you are interested in learning more, please register for our session on enabling remote production as part of our Virtual Q | NAB Event, taking place May 12th through 14th.

To view our Partner blog, click here