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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  

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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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How’s Your NVMe?

CMMA Blog

With so many technologies touting faster speeds, NVMe is surely top of mind for many who are trying to determine its advantages.  You may already have been using it for quite some time in your personal devices like a laptop or tablet, and only now looking at it to help meet the demands of the performance-intensive workloads in your datacenter.  And of course, NVMe will certainly do that.  In fact, NVMe can provide performance that’s orders of magnitude faster than traditional flash storage. NVMe is perhaps the hottest storage technology right now, and for good reason.

Another advantage that you may not yet be aware of, is how it can help save infrastructure costs.  How is that?   For shared storage environments where direct user access to data is needed, you have some choices. NVMe not only supports Fibre Channel but also Ethernet.  We’re all familiar with FC-SANs.  And we’re very comfortable with that technology since it became more broadly integrated in the late ‘90s.  That’s the 1990s, as in the previous century!  And Fibre Channel is still well-used and beneficial in many use cases, and that’s a credit to that networking technology.

However, the
other option covered here is Ethernet – and this networking topology creates
the possibility for a new frontier. One in which high-throughput, low-latency,
and lower costs can all be reaped.

And especially when the NVMe storage system needs to be shared and connected to the outside, that’s when things can become really interesting, and really fast! 

This is where incorporating RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) into the architecture comes in. RDMA is a game-changer by providing predictable, ultra-fast network performance. The key is that RDMA provides direct access between clients and remote NVMe storage devices, without going through the network stack or CPU.  This translates into real gains in performance and reduced latencies.

The benefit? RDMA networking technology
can deliver SAN speeds over a less expensive ethernet network
infrastructure. 

If this sounds interesting to you, and you’d like to learn more about how to meet the increasing demands of shared workloads at scale, check out our ‘NVMe, RDMA and Other Emerging Technologies ’ White Paper. This is a technical primer that provides information about shared storage with NVMe, workloads that are a good fit, along with topology comparisons and RDMA options. And it all starts with NVMe based storage, which increasingly serves as primary storage in many-tiered storage applications where real-time requirements exist. 

Quantum’s F-Series NVMe storage servers were designed for the highest-performance workloads with the highest availability requirements. Visit our Quantum F-Series NVMe Storage page to learn more about how Quantum is enabling customers to process higher-resolution content with screaming fast performance, while at the same time reducing both storage and network infrastructure complexity and costs. Taking the first steps today by beginning to integrate faster technologies will give you the leap needed to keep up with productivity and a competitive edge within your industry.

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Same NVMe Speed, Lower Price

CMMA Blog

Last year at NAB, we introduced the Quantum F2000 – an NVMe storage server designed for the highest-performance workloads with the highest availability requirements.  The F2000 has won multiple industry awards and is in production at some of the world’s largest brands, government agencies, and major studios and post-houses.  It’s been a great year!

But there was also a consistent point of feedback from many customers – they see the benefits of NVMe (accelerate productivity, reduce infrastructure cost and complexity, gain back data center space), but not every workload requires a highly-available server and the expense that comes with that.

Enter the Quantum F1000.  The F1000 uses the same software-defined storage platform as the F2000, and provides ultra-fast streaming performance and response times, with a less expensive server platform and design.

Like the F2000, the F1000 gives users the parallel processing capabilities that are inherent with NVMe and uses RDMA networking technology to deliver SAN speeds over less expensive ethernet network infrastructure.

Also, like the F2000, the F1000 is easy to deploy as part of a StorNext file storage cluster.  And system health can be monitored anytime, anywhere by connecting to Quantum’s cloud-based monitoring software.  StorNext can even move files and folders between NVMe and nearline pools of storage, so you can get the benefits of NVMe for those workloads that require it most without committing to an all-NVMe infrastructure.

In short, if you have been researching NVMe, and thinking about how it could benefit your environment, now is the time to reach out.  We’ll work with you to design an architecture that best fits your needs, for a price point that doesn’t crush your budget.

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Efficiency or Else…

bottleneck

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe used the phrase “less is
more” to describe the minimalist aesthetic of his work.  While I find minimalism thought-provoking,
I’m a moderate in most things and an unrepentant maximalist when it comes to
dessert.

Technology vendors and consumers relate to tech products
like I relate to dessert.  It’s all about
more.  Bigger screens, faster CPUs, higher
resolutions, more features.  Once the
basics are commoditized, adding features is about the only way for vendors to
differentiate, so that’s what they do.

Data storage is not immune to this condition.  Formerly bare-bones storage arrays have been
larded up with features.  Snapshots,
tiering, deduplication, compression, clones, replication, scrubbing, analytics
and all the other stuff can be useful.  But
there is a cost that has long been hidden.

price tag

Modern CPUs are so fast that they can submit a read and have
time to walk to Starbucks for a latte before the storage responds.  With traditional hard drives most of this
delay is due to rotational latency.  With
SAS SSDs it’s the single-queue inefficiency of SCSI.  The storage is the bottleneck.  As a result there’s lots of time to run
feature software on the array, and not a lot of pressure for that software to
be efficient.

Now with NVMe, suddenly the storage is orders of magnitude
faster, and the CPU is in much higher demand. 
The weight of all those features becomes apparent in the form of lower
performance.  Marc Staimer of Dragon
Slayer Consulting refers to this as the “CPU
chokepoint .”  He notes that
you can improve performance by throwing more CPU at the problem, but that there
are seriously diminishing marginal returns. 
Storage class memory (SCM) is going to make the situation even worse,
and not even Gordon Moore can
save us this time.  The piper is here
with his hand out.

clock

To maximize the potential of NVMe storage and the bang for
the customer’s buck, everything about the system design, especially the storage
software, must be efficient.  Generating
big numbers is important, but if it takes obscene core counts to get there your
product will cost too much.

When Quantum designed our F-Series NVMe storage array ,
efficiency was top of mind.  We didn’t
just take some array architecture designed for general-purpose IT and stuff in
NVMe drives.  We carefully crafted a
hardware and software system that provides over 24GB/s of throughput in 2U, with
low latency to support multiple streams of 4K and 8K editing and playout
without dropping frames.  A single 2U
appliance can do the same job as a full rack or two of legacy storage,
providing space efficiency as well.  And F-Series
is cost-efficient, providing a surprising amount of performance per dollar.

Quantum’s most demanding customers have always been in film, where ever-escalating image quality demands huge streaming performance.  F-Series was designed for customers like these, who don’t want or need storage arrays with deduplication, cup holders, or power seats.  Customers who understand that sometimes less is more.  Those who have tried it have been supremely impressed, so I know we got it right.  Give us a shout if you want to see how efficient high-performance NVMe storage can be.  And while you’re at it cut me a piece of that cake – a big one with lots of frosting.

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The Latest Buzz from the Front Lines of the Media Industry

Archive Storage

Those who have attended IBC in Amsterdam at some point in their career know that participating in the show is like briefly transplanting oneself into an alternate universe for 5 days.  What the rest of the world knows as Friday, Saturday, Sunday becomes IBC Day 1, IBC Day 2, IBC Day 3, etc.  Maneuvering between the massive halls of the RAI and trying to find obscure meeting rooms can be like navigating a small city (and without the help of GPS)!  And the amount of sleep one gets due to the post-exhibition activity is probably most akin to a weekend in Las Vegas.

All of that, however, is a small price to
pay for the wealth of benefits and opportunity that can be had while attending
the media industry’s biggest conference outside America. From an efficiency
standpoint, it’s fairly impossible to outmatch the density of meetings one can have
with customers and partners in such a short timeframe. This year this that was
especially true as our Quantum team had our meeting rooms constantly full, not
to mention a packed partner event on the opening day. 

Latest Trends Taking Shape

The other primary benefit is that being at
the show is an outstanding opportunity to learn about where the industry is
going, as well as how these trends are taking shape in the challenges the
vendor community will need to solve next. Given their importance, I think these
are certainly worth sharing – so in no particular order, here are the trends
that seemed to be most topical at the show:

Jason Coari CSI Magazine Awards IBC 2019
Goran Nastic (editor at CSI Magazine), Jason Coari and Paolo Pescatore accepting CSI Magazine’s ‘Best Data Storage Solution’ award at IBC 2019.

Democratization
of Video  

As video has become the dominant communications platform across the world, and is on track to make up more than 80% of the world’s data, both traditional media and non-traditional media organizations are finding themselves in the middle of the evolution to constantly be producing video content. One effect of this transformation means production timelines are shortening and distribution channels are broadening. All meaning that organizations need more sophisticated and flexible storage solutions to support the creation of an immense amount of compelling content. 

Cloud-based
Workflows

Just the day before the show began, Disney
had announced an agreement with Microsoft to do post-production in Microsoft
Azure. This move could certainly be a sign of things to come and is exciting with
the flexibility it could offer those organizations creating content, as well as
efficiencies it could offer by doing more work closer to where the data resides.
At Quantum we are keenly aware of this trend, which is why we are investing in StorNext to
facilitate all stages of the media workflow whether it’s on-premise,
off-premise, or any combination of the two.

Transition
to IP

What was a hot topic at NAB continued to be a hot topic at IBC – and it’s easy to see why.  From lower capital costs to more rapid deployment and streamlined operations, placing massive importance on transitioning to an all-IP based infrastructure.” This is why all the products that Quantum has launched over the past year are optimized to provide maximum performance across Ethernet networking. 

Remote
Production

The fact that this was discussed so broadly
was somewhat surprising. However, as customers shared the benefits of doing
more production onsite, the fact that it’s becoming a bigger trend became more
apparent. Quantum actually has solid experience here working with companies
like The Rebel
Fleet – an innovative post-production team doing onsite production in the
mountains of New Zealand. We also recently launched our R-Series
ruggedized storage system to further facilitate these types of use cases. Could
this become more mainstream in the months to come? I wouldn’t be surprised….

IMG 8039

So that’s a wrap on the top trends from IBC
2019. In closing, I’d like to give one final kudos to the entire Quantum
product and engineering team that had anything to do with designing and
building our F-Series .
The product picked up two more awards at the show and is on track to become the
media industry’s de facto standard for ultra-performance NVMe-based storage. And
stay tuned for some exciting developments in this space over the coming months,
as their work is just getting started!  

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