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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

Raising the Bar for Active Archive Solutions

Archive

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.

To view our Partner blog, click here

This Week at the Q

Archive

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

To view our Partner blog, click here

Crisis Management Strategies for Your Remote Workforce

Archive

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

This Week at the Q

CMMA Blog

Welcome to our new weekly blog, ‘This Week at the Q’!

Every Friday, I close out my week by sending a ‘Top 5’ company email. It’s really a great way to wrap up the week, and share the latest in what’s new at the Q. For a while, I wasn’t sure how many people actually read it, until one week when I was offline and didn’t send it, people from all over the company emailed asking where it was! After confessing I was a slacker that week, it got me thinking; maybe our customer community would enjoy our news tidbits just as much. So let’s give this a shot. Leave a comment if you’re reading, I’d love to hear from you!

  1. We were excited when Jessica Iler recently joined our Product Marketing team, bringing a wealth of storage experience from her work both vendor and analyst side. As we’ve had to become more physically distanced, Jessica has been a passionate supporter of technology that enables us to be more connected than ever. Read more in her new TV Technology byline, Making Remote Production the New Norm , where Jessica discusses today’s remote production environment and the effects on workflows and creative teams. The article includes some tips on how to keep these remote workflows in motion and optimize collaboration and productivity.
  2. Following on from that, and getting a little more technical, Everett Ward from our Tech Marketing team posted this new blog Tips for Remote Workflow Operations .
  3. Rounding out the remote trifecta, Diana Salazar from our Product Marketing team posted her new blog, Crisis Management Strategies for Your Remote Workforce . Diana has spent quite a bit of time speaking with not only our customers, but also our own Quantum IT team to understand the biggest pain points as we moved to a remote workforce. We all have an enormous amount of respect for our IT heroes working day and night to ensure we can work securely and keep moving forwards during this challenging time. You’ve pulled us together, and kept us connected.
  4. If you’re a StorNext® customer, we have a new white paper covering TISAX certification . In many industries, our customers must securely share sensitive information across corporate boundaries and be assured that it is always protected. Requiring all parties to demonstrate compliance with a specific set of information, security standards are one way to achieve this goal. TISAX is one such standard, developed specifically by the auto industry, but addressing concerns commonly found in other infosec standards. If you’re a StorNext customer subject to information security standards compliance, you may find this Quantum StorNext Security white paper interesting.
  5. All of the sessions from our recent VirtualQ | Protect & Archive digital event, are now available on-demand here . Tune in to hear Quantum and our partners discuss strategies for processing, storing and protecting massive volumes of critical enterprise data. 80% of the world’s data will be unstructured by 2025, and we’re addressing those challenges head-on to support this massive data growth and archive your most valuable data. Interested in a topic we didn’t cover at the event? Drop me a note and we’ll add it to the line-up!

I look forward to sharing our top 5 news bytes again next week,

Natasha

To view our Partner blog, click here

Tips for Remote Workflow Operations

CMMA Blog

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

remote workflows blog

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