A marketing director we will call Judy with a nonprofit we shall call Suffer No Fools came to our sister company Crew Connection upon recommendation. She was skittish. After they talked through her options and how one of our vetted crews would go about telling the nonprofit’s story, she softened. Finally, she revealed why she was skeptical.

As a nonprofit with a limited budget, they’d first hired a college student–a friend of a friend–who would produce a video for way less than anyone else she’d heard from. It was a simple job, she thought, and he could capture good quality footage without a ton of equipment.

Unfortunately, Judy had fallen victim to the idea that a good camera (for which most people can look no further than their own phones) was enough to get the results she wanted. While they’d planned to have a simple, but high-quality video at their fundraising gala that year, what they got was unusable. He filmed without a tripod (nausea all around!). He didn’t light his subjects (it would’ve taken a highly-skilled and expensive colorist to brighten the shot). And the composition of the shots were comparable to your Aunt Doris’s Facebook posts.

So they paid less than they would have if they’d hired a professional crew but they couldn’t use anything they got. That “cheap” hire turned out to be quite expensive after all.

This can happen in any marketing arena, but as the pandemic made safe on-set video production harder, videos were one of the first places to suffer. And while people were forgiving of lackluster production early on, we’re all suffering Zoom fatigue now and a polished production is as important as ever.

A Happy Ending

The next year, Judy made the case and set aside the funds to hire professionals. They’d missed a whole year of opportunity without a video that told the story and this time, they wanted to do it right. If that’s where you’re at, know this: some in-person productions are resuming and many crews are now offering remote crewing options.

It was an expensive lesson: We can’t afford not to hire the professionals.

Bottom Line

A reputable crew will have examples for you to look at. Check out their website or ask for samples that are most relevant to the project you want to do or the story you want to tell. Make sure both parties know the plan for the exact deliverables, timeline, and budget. Put it all in a contract (it protects both parties!).

Never hire based on price alone or take a chance without seeing the crew’s work. It’s just too risky to gamble on.

One of the most valuable things you get when you hire a professional video crew on Crew Connection is confidence.  Our team of professionals personally vets every crew before they make it on our database. That kind of peace of mind is priceless.

The post The Most Expensive Marketing Mistake You Can Make appeared first on PayReel .

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Overview

Coldago Research , an analyst firm that tracks the IT infrastructure market, recently published their annual Research Map for Object Storage .  During the last year we innovated based on customer needs, and we’re very proud that Coldago recognizes that in our new placement, a significant gain over the past report. We’d like to share our insights on the progress. 

Coldago Research Map 2019 for Object Storage map was published shortly after the ActiveScale acquisition from Western Digital.  The report analyzes object storage vendors for “Execution and Capabilities” and “Vision and Strategy”.  In the 2019 report, Quantum was positioned as a “Specialist” in the lower left portion of the map.  The diagram below shows the 2020 report with an overlay of the previous position. 

Now fast forward to 2020 for a success story.  In the latest Coldago report, Quantum’s ActiveScale had the highest gain in both metrics, Execution/Capabilities and Vision/Strategy, of any vendor in the report.  The product had a dramatic improvement in position, advancing over other vendors in the process through a series of continued innovation based on customer needs.   Let’s take a deeper look at the foundation of ActiveScale and how we built on top of that with new features added over the last 12 months.  Besides the product improvements, our gains reflect sales momentum as well.  The ActiveScale feature set resonates with customers, and they’ve selected ActiveScale as their object storage system of choice. 

Core architecture

The architecture of ActiveScale is built on a strong foundation including Dynamic Data Placement (DDP) and Dynamic Data Repair (DDR).  These two pillars together provide a platform that is highly scalable, offers very high-performance with outstanding reliability, and is very easy to manage.  Many of our customers have many PB’s and even EB’s of object storage with a single administrator.  DDP provides the most efficient way to store and protect objects on disk, all in a GEO-protected manner.    For a deeper dive, check out this tech talk on how it works, it’s quite interesting.  DDP tracks all the metadata on flash-based media for maximum performance yet places the massive amount of data on lower cost spinning disk drives.  This combination yields the highest performance at the lowest possible cost.   DDR constantly monitors and protects data, predictively monitoring the system to reduce administrative time and maximize availability. 

Product Updates

Over the last 12 months, the engineering team has been hard at work delivering many new features to add even more capabilities.  Here’s just a partial list:

• Small file optimization – This new feature aggregates small files into a large object prior to erasure encoding. This results in a much more efficient utilization of capacity and better overall performance for small object transactions.
• Smaller, more affordable configurations – ActiveScale now comes in a smaller, three-node configuration. With this entry-level option, a company can benefit from the management, protection, and preservation capabilities of ActiveScale in a smaller more compact system, rather than waiting until they have a large-scale operation.
• Object lock for data immutability – Object Lock protects data from malicious acts such as data deletion, relocation, and ransomware. Once immutability is set on an object or a bucket it cannot be modified until the policy expires.

Future looks bright

Coldago’s report showing Quantum’s improvement highlights the dramatic progress in the ActiveScale product line.  We knew the product was a winner back in 2020, and with the continuous improvements made over the last year, analysts and customers alike are recognizing the results.  We’re not stopping there; we have a great release plan in place for the coming year.  Stay tuned – we’ll let our customers and analysts know what we’re planning and look forward to continued recognition. 

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Surveillance cameras, collectively, generate more data than any other use case or application today.  Let that sink in for a minute. More than all the cat videos. More than all the teenage text messages. It’s beyond huge.

At the same time, surveillance storage is growing exponentially based on increasing numbers of cameras, higher resolution and frame rates, and longer retention periods. Storing more surveillance footage for longer periods of time creates bigger headaches for system administrators, who must deliver this video storage without blowing up the budget.

To reduce those headaches and simplify system design, Quantum published a reference architecture for scalable large-scale shared surveillance storage. It includes configuration details for mission-critical systems supporting hundreds to thousands of cameras, and retention periods of 30 days to a year. These are examples, not hard limits – smaller and much larger systems are possible.

In terms of componentry, Quantum’s VS1110-A application servers are used in HA pairs, running the recording servers as virtual machines supporting recording server failover. A Quantum StorNext file system (the fastest file system for video ) running on Xcellis appliances with QXS storage delivers the shared storage and data protection. Validation was performed with common industry tools to ensure maximum performance without dropping frames.

Every customer’s needs are different, so this reference architecture leverages a building block approach to create flexible, scalable video storage systems of any size. Quantum’s cold storage options, including ActiveScale , public cloud, or even tape can be used to reduce storage costs, and GPU-enabled servers are available for running high-performance analytics applications.

With over 20 years of experience helping customers store, manage, and protect video assets globally, the addition of the shared storage solution to Quantum’s already extensive surveillance portfolio ensures we have the right solution for every project size and scope.  Whether you have 50 cameras or 50,000 cat videos, we can help.

Visit the Primary Shared Storage for Surveillance web page to learn more.  

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Non-Volatile Memory Express (“NVMe”) was introduced as a new protocol for flash storage many years ago, and with distinct advantages over traditional SSD storage it has quickly become adopted for use cases that require high performance.  As a protocol, NVMe is designed to take advantage of the parallelism of flash storage, and eliminates some of the transport bottlenecks in legacy protocols and architectures. 

Quantum first introduced NVMe storage servers in early 2019 with the Quantum F-Series, a line of highly available NVMe storage servers for ingest, processing, and rendering of unstructured data with the StorNext file system.  Quantum is now introducing NVMe to the R-Series line of edge storage devices, to ingest and process large amounts of sensor data inside a moving vehicle. 

Test vehicles used to develop automated driver assistance systems (ADAS) as well as fully autonomous driving generate large amounts of sensor data.  This sensor data – video, still images, LiDAR images – requires fast ingest in a compact form factor – an ideal use case for NVMe.

The new R6000 product delivers up to 61.44 TB of NVMe storage capacity, in a compact form factor designed to fit in the trunk of a car.  It is easily integrated with a full suite of LiDAR, radar, camera, GPS, and other sensors, and can work alongside a wide array of in-vehicle data annotation tools.

The canister containing the NVMe storage can also be easily removed once a car is parked in a garage, so a technician can upload the new data into a shared storage system for processing, and quickly put a new canister back in the test vehicle to get it back on the road.  To learn more about the new R6000 product, check out the product page .

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The Dewey Decimal System (DDC) and Library of Congress Classification (LC) are ways in which books are organized in a library. A catalog can be searched by author or title and a classification number is given so one can go to the library stacks and retrieve the book. Stacks are just shelves that anyone can access. Every library also has an archive. This is where documents and books are kept that are not readily accessible. If one wants access to a document in the archives, typically a request must be made before access is granted. The library system is a well-designed and understood classification and organization system. Unfortunately, our digital “libraries” of files are not so easily searchable or accessible. There are no standards to classify and organize data, nor is there any standards regarding how we refer to data and where we store it. The following is my attempt to define data types and storage types to make the discussion around data more cohesive.

Data Types

We might think that when saying ‘data types’, we refer to text versus images or one application format versus another, but data types really mean two things:

1) Does this data change or does it persist in its original or final state?

It is a common mistake to assume that if data is no longer changing, it must be old or irrelevant or won’t be accessed, and therefore, may be moved into an archive with the expectation that no one will access it. The reality is that much of unstructured data that is not changing gets referenced for long periods of time after creation. As an example, a high-definition microscope creates data, which may be used in different studies or newer algorithms may be applied to analyze the data. In this situation, original data may be accessed many times, though not changed. When data is static, not changing, we don’t want to apply traditional data protection tools, such as backup and restore, because we would be backing up the same file. Instead, we want to have a storage platform that ensures appropriate data durability without the overhead to the environment.

2) Does the data get accessed or is it an ‘insurance policy’ and is likely to remain untouched once stored?

Archiving has become a default term used with storage where data is not being accessed. To differentiate between data never to be accessed and active data that doesn’t change, the industry had adopted the term ‘Active Archive.’ It is misleading on many levels. First, it is an oxymoron that contradicts itself. Archive is assumed to be something stored in a vault without regular access.  Active is the opposite. When speaking of accessed data and untouched data, it is best to refer to data as either active or “passive.” The drivers in terms of storage platforms are determined by the performance requirements for data access.

Storage Types

Storage systems are defined by access performance and persistence resiliency. Systems with higher access performance cost more per GB. In general, keeping capacity constant, as performance demands and resiliency demands increase, so do the costs. When selecting a storage system, it is critical to understand access and resiliency requirements.

Data that doesn’t change requires the system to have higher levels of resiliency. If performance is required, then the system should most likely be disk-based. Most commonly, these systems are object-based and use erasure coding to provide the necessary resiliency.

Data that doesn’t change and has a low-performance requirement may be well served by a tape system. Such a system would be referred to as an archive. Data resiliency is still paramount; tape systems may be deployed with data stored in two copies or using recent development, erasure coding on a tape or across tapes.

Data that does change and requires performance may use backup and restore operations for resiliency. Architecturally, it could use either RAID or erasure coding, as well as high-performance drives, such as SSD or NVMe.

The high-performance system is often defined based on access protocols; NFS/SMB is NAS, iSCSI/FC is block. When it comes to systems for static data with low access performance requirements, there are no specific terms. Some call it archive , object , active archive, data repository… but none of them truly relay the capability and use case of the system. Maybe it would be better to find new terms. Maybe we can look to traditional libraries, the original data repositories, as inspiration. Maybe it is not an active archive but storage stacks. And, maybe Archive gets to keep its designation as a storage medium requiring effort to extract data. These may not be the best terms, but must start somewhere.

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It’s 2021 and people are craving normalcy. They want to see the inside of restaurants again. They want to get massages and go to the gym. They want to hug their grandparents. What they may not want to do again? Wear pants with zippers or wait in security lines to travel for a meeting they could accomplish on Zoom.

COVID-19 has laid bare the weaknesses we didn’t know we had and the impossibilities we would be forced to make possible. Anytime we face a challenge, we have a choice. Do we pine away for what once was or do we create what could be?

What Will You Run Toward?

Instead of running away from a year that pushed us to our collective brink, let’s shift the conversation toward what we can run toward. Toward opportunities to make our systems more effective and adaptable. Toward ways we can serve our customers and clients better. Toward filling the gaps we’ve become so painfully aware of. We’ve always heard that necessity is the mother of invention. In a year with so much necessity, what will you invent?

We’ve seen some examples of people doing exactly this at our sister company, Crew Connection, where crews have figured out remote event production (a few steps up from Zoom) and how to offer pre-pandemic quality footage while keeping people safe. Check out the details here . We’re pretty proud of how they’ve adapted.

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