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VirtualQ I Transform Recap: Helping you Unlock the Value of Unstructured Data

ActiveScale

As we head into the holiday season, it’s a good time to recap some of the major things we’ve introduced this year, and in many ways our recent VirtualQ I Transform event was the culmination of a years’ worth of effort in bringing new products and solutions to market. 

In November, our VirtualQ I Transform event focused on how unstructured data growth, and unlocking the business value in this data, is transforming how our customers think about data. This event was the culmination of our launch efforts of the expanded portfolio we announced on November 10 – focused on managing, storing, and protecting unstructured data across its lifecycle. You can access all of the sessions and watch at your convenience here .

Most Popular Topics During VirtualQ I Transform

Based on the hundreds of attendees across many different sessions hosted over two days (one European event, and one event for the Americas), here are some of the topics that resonated most and generated the most interest:

Unstructured Data Sprawl: Many of our customers are outgrowing their capacity and looking at new ways to manage ‘unstructured data sprawl.’  We are helping these customers gain better visibility into what data they have, where it lives, and automate ways to move data between edge, core, and cloud environments. The new automated data movement we’ve added to StorNext 7 and ATFS can help in this regard, and were two of the key things we introduced. 

ATFS Storage Platform: There were many questions about our new ATFS storage platform, an easy to use, cost effective NAS platform with integrated data classification. This data classification is a major advancement in giving customers visibility into the file data they are storing.  With simple queries, customers can gain new insights into the make-up of their file data, where it lives, and then quickly use those insights to drive actions that can be enforced with data placement policies, data protection policies, and storage quotas. 

ATFS Trial Download: As we mentioned during our event, for anyone interested in learning more about the ATFS platform, and to start to classify the file data you have today, download a full version of ATFS here . It only takes a few minutes, and you can start to see the impact this platform can make to your NAS infrastructure.

Ransomware Protection: There was also a lot of interest in new ways and best practices to protect against ransomware, and security of data in general. This continues to be top of mind for many of our customers, and we now have options to protect against ransomware regardless of your technology choice, and regardless of the application you are using. We’ve introduced Object Lock to our ActiveScale object store software , we are adding a similar snapshot retention lock feature to our DXi backup appliances , and tape remains the most secure storage with innate air-gapped protection, Active Vault software to automatically move tapes to an in-library vault, and security capabilities like AES-256-bit encryption and multi-factor authentication.

“Forever” Data Archives: Lastly, there was continued interest in the emerging realization that much of this valuable data being created and analyzed will need to be kept forever in a private cloud. Our solutions for this “forever” data archive continue to drive interest, from object storage software with erasure encoding, to RAIL tape, to ways to index and search the content in these archives. Look for some exciting announcements in this area in the coming weeks and months. You can check out the “Forever Archive” white paper here .

Looking Ahead

We are continuing to innovate and transform our own business with a focus on solving our customers’ most pressing business challenges in the areas of video, digital images, and other forms of unstructured data, and we can’t wait for 2021! 

Watch VirtualQ I Transform Sessions On-Demand

If you missed the event, watch replays at your own pace to learn more about managing, storing, and protecting unstructured data across its lifecycle.

Watch Sessions On-Demand Now!

To view our Partner blog, click here

This Week at the Q

ActiveScale

Welcome to another entry of ‘This Week at the Q’ and our top 5 highlights. It’s been a busy week continuing the product announcements from our expanded portfolio!

1. Continuing on the news from last week’s launch of our new expanded portfolio – covered here in Blocks & Files – this week we announced more details around our next-gen StorNext® 7 high-performance file system and ActiveScaleTM object storage advancements.

sn gui

2. This new byline by Matt Dewey on “Managing Complex Object Stores” just published in Disaster Recovery Journal. Object stores have found a home in the cloud and in data centers, becoming the repository for long-lived and high-value data. Read more here to learn about use cases for object storage, its advantages in key markets, as well as some of the challenges it can present and what to consider.

activscale

3. We enjoyed connecting with the high-performance computing community this week at the virtual SC20 event. If we missed you, you can still check out this video interview we did with InsideHPC, “At Virtual SC20: Quantum Corp. Takes on High Performance Storage of Unstructured Data.”

sc20

4. Check out this new blog post, “Cyber Insurance Market is Evolving Due to Ransomware Demands.” You can learn how the cyber security insurance market is evolving amidst an increase in ransomware demands and payments. Insurance companies are starting to move the risk over to subscribers, requiring stricter controls. Read more here.

cyber insurance

5. One of the reasons I love working at Quantum is the culture and the people I get to work with every day, and it is most definitely an honor to work with Liz King! Get to know Quantum’s CRO a little more in this new Authority Magazine article, ”Women of the C-Suite: Liz King of Quantum.”

liz king 1

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

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.

To view our Partner blog, click here

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

To view our Partner blog, click here

Leveraging StorNext’s Self-Describing Objects

cloud

Want to run a cloud-based application against data that StorNext has stored in the cloud? Now you can.  Need access to that data from other sites? Now it’s possible. Looking to share files with business partners via the cloud? You’ve got it. Even if you just want insurance that you can always get your data back from the cloud, through disaster or technology obsolescence, it’s here.

StorNext has been ‘cloud-aware’ for a very long time, making it easy to use public cloud destinations or on-prem object stores to store and protect warm and cold data. With the release of v6.4, StorNext can now store additional metadata with objects, including the full path and filename of the source file.  Previously, this information was only available by querying StorNext directly. Storing the path and filename in the cloud with the object makes these objects “self-describing.”

To enable massive scale, StorNext stores the source path and filename in a user-defined metadata field.  You can see the contents of this field using tools like the AWS Console, S3 Browser or Cyberduck. That’s fine if you only have a few objects to manipulate, but if you need to handle a lot of objects, it’s better to write a script.

I am not a programmer. I have done some coding, but mostly in C back when I was an EE student, and that was almost 30 years ago.  So, believe me when I tell you that if I can do this, you can do this.

Below is a sample script that will copy every object from a StorNext-controlled AWS bucket down to the local machine, naming the resulting files using the paths and filenames stored by StorNext with the objects.

I used PowerShell on Windows because it seemed minimally intimidating, and because Amazon has something called AWS Tools for PowerShell that provides easy access to AWS APIs. In case you didn’t know, PowerShell is available for Linux and MacOS too, and the basic concepts I used could easily be translated to your favorite development environment.

Here’s the script:

# Credentials must have been established prior to running this script using 'Set-AWSCredential' directly or recalling a stored profile
 
# Set source bucket and destination local path
$bucket = '228868asn64tapeaws'
$localPath = 'C:test'
 
# Scan all objects in bucket, load metadata into array 'objects'
$objects = Get-S3Object -BucketName $bucket
 
# Loop through object metadata, pull object keys into array 'fileName'
foreach ($object in $objects) {
$fileName = $object.Key
 
# Loop through array 'fileName', & for each object key do a few things:
foreach ($file in $fileName) {

# Get object metadata
$Metadata = Get-S3ObjectMetadata -Bucketname $bucket -Key $fileName -Select 'Metadata’

# Set 'localFileName' to SN stored path
$localFileName = $Metadata.Item('x-amz-meta-path')

# Create valid local path including filename
$localFilePath = Join-Path $localPath $localFileName

# URL Decode local path
$localFilePath = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlDecode($localFilePath)

# Download object to local path & name
Read-S3Object -BucketName $bucket -Key $fileName -File $localFilePath }}

That’s it. Less than a dozen lines of code, and I bet someone smarter could make it even simpler. When you run it, you get a result that looks like this:

sn blog 1

It is much more useful than what you get if you simply download the objects, which looks like this:

filename

This was a dirt-simple example, (and it comes with absolutely no warranty), but even I can see that the possibilities for customization are endless. We have plans to make it easier to browse and re-use objects for ad-hoc use cases, but for handling lots of objects or where complex filtering is required, scripting will always be the best way. I hope I’ve convinced you that it doesn’t have to be hard. For complete details on how I set up AWS Tools for PowerShell and additional information, please see our Tech Brief entitled “Accessing StorNext Self-Describing Objects with PowerShell” available here .

Final note: Thanks to everyone who shares their PowerShell knowledge on the ‘Net. This blog in particular provided a critical jump start to my thinking.

To view our Partner blog, click here

This Week at the Q

CMMA Blog

Welcome to another entry of ‘This Week at the Q’ and our top 5 highlights – make sure to read number 5 for a terrorific Halloween update that will help you up your pumpkin game!

1. What’s better than 1 puppy?

puppies social

We have 3 new product announcements coming soon! You can follow the countdown on our website , and register for our upcoming VirtualQ | Transform event where we will be showcasing these new solutions and how they unlock the value of your unstructured data – both today and tomorrow.

2. ViON Corporation has launched archive-as-a-service to provide customers that require an on-premise solution for tight control of their data, but want a cloud-like experience, with a flexible, low-cost alternative. This ViON service uses Quantum StorNext® to provide either a file or object interface, and Quantum tape storage as the low-cost, long-term storage technology. Like cloud services, this as-a-service offering provides flexible resources that can easily scale up – or down – at any time, in a pay-as-you-go financial model. You can read more in the case study here .

blo vion

3. Quantum’s Noemi Greyzdorf, Director of Product Marketing, participated in a panel discussion hosted by the CEO of Daregraphic, on “Managing Unstructured Data to Unlock Enterprise Value.” The panel explored innovative ways to help organizations federate this data and realize its true value.  The replay is available here .

4. We’re so excited that StorNext 6.4 won Product of the Year at 2020 NAB Show NY! Recognized for enabling content mobility and making hybrid and cloud storage environments more accessible. Read more here .

nab2020 winner

5. Come join us, and experts Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, to up your Halloween game this year! On October 27th, at 3PM ET, we will provide a quick glimpse into Quantum’s transformation, before transforming your pumpkin carving with a 50-minute demo by Maniac Pumpkin Carvers to give you all the tips you need. The first 50 registrants will receive a free pumpkin carving kit, and all attendees will receive a special treat – we promise no tricks! Families welcome!

halloween contest

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