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Data Protection and Archive Strategies at Your Fingertips

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We had a great turn out last week to our VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event of online sessions where we had an opportunity to discuss some of the latest data trends, challenges, strategies, and tactics needed for processing, storing, and protecting massive volumes of critical enterprise data, which continues to grow even as we are all working remotely. We want to thank our end users, partner community, and attendees for joining us. We thoroughly enjoyed sharing these important and relevant topics and look forward to bringing you more pressing topics again as we evolve and show you how Quantum is innovating.

vqpa blog sessions

How are You Preparing for Massive Data Growth?
Data has not stopped its progression towards those massive growth numbers as predicted by IDC market research, which indicates that about 80% of the world’s data will be unstructured by 2025. We began with our CEO, Jamie Lerner, whose Welcome Keynote set the tone by level setting on where he sees Quantum playing an important role in this unstructured world and how we are currently addressing those challenges head on with object storage . Some of the most pressing topics we discussed was how to prepare for a future where 80% of data is unstructured now so that your organization is not caught unprepared?

How Do You Backup Petabytes of Data? Answer: You Don’t
Another interesting topic had to do with questions that are coming up more and more in our data-driven world is how do you backup petabytes of files? If you didn’t already know the answer to that, it’s you don’t. It was a very interesting concept and highly encourage to check out what our experts are talking about in the context of petabyte/exabyte scenarios.

Reducing Backup Footprint and Spend
In the enterprise backup and archive realm we want to help you meet and exceed your SLAs, so we centered the discussion around Quantum’s high-performance purposely built backup appliances – DXi9000 and DXi4800 – the most dense PBBA out in the market today. With this solution, we’ve been able to help our customers reduce their footprint and spend by consolidating many PBBA’s into a single 10U rackspace totaling 1PB of capacity! When you’re thinking about consolidating without sacrificing performance, Quantum DXi9000 could be the answer you’ve been looking for.

Solving Data Protection Challenges with Veeam and WekaIO
Finally, we invited our partners WekaIO and Veeam to share with us some reference architectures for machine learning at scale and, of course, the ever-important best practice backup rule of 3-2-1-1 . With Veeam, we dove into the backup rule, that is nevertheless so important to protect your data against ransomware . The role of object store in today’s enterprise environments is on everyone’s mind and these open discussions are the best way to learn how you can evaluate and leverage this cool technology and see if it’s the right fit for your growing data needs.

Finally, we shared how to build archive storage at exabyte scale and found a surprising twist to this story and a very interesting topic of discussion among our attendees. With the ever-increasing amounts of data growth in video and video-like data, and all these other topics mentioned, surely there is a session that you will find very interesting, so be sure to check them out.

Watch Session Recordings on Demand
If you missed our VirtualQ I Protect & Archive event, we’ve made all the sessions available for you to watch on demand. Watch recordings now.

To view our Partner blog, click here

A Silver Lining of Innovation

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It is been a long time coming. Two full days of sessions with our valued customers and those interested in our solutions. We’re excited to be hosting VirtualQ I Protect & Archive , a virtual event featuring live keynotes, educational sessions, and technology demonstrations, from June 9-10, 2020. Over the course of two days, we will present on the latest data protection and business continuity developments, as well as host virtual sessions featuring subject-matter experts and technology partners, including Veeam and WekaIO and we hope you can join us!

During this time, you can plan to learn about protecting and preserving your most critical data including:

  • Preparing for a future where 80% of data is unstructured
  • Best practices for backing up and managing immense amounts of data
  • Machine learning at scale (with WekaIO)
  • The role of object storage within Enterprise IT
  • Tactics to protect data from ransomware and cyber threats
  • The latest innovations to come from Quantum’s partnership with Veeam

With all these relevant topics, even during a pandemic like the one we are living through right now, data keeps growing. And there is no better way to face the future where 80% of data is unstructured than preparing for it. Though we stopped going to the office, we have not stopped creating data and, even more so, now that we are working remotely, these end points are creating data at immense speeds and in more ways than one. What is the silver lining in all this? It is driving our engineers to create new technology and enhancing our solutions to perform and deliver on our customer’s needs. The more we are pressed, the more innovation is squeezed out to improve our solutions and services. We are excited to share the latest with you during these sessions.

So, what is Quantum doing to help you? We are innovating. We are adding advanced features that will enable you to securely protect and archive your data cost-effectively whether you chose disk, tape, or object storage. We are driving with performance. Have you checked out the latest performance numbers on our flagship DXi backup appliance? We are also integrating tightly with our technology partners such as WekaIO and Veeam to meet or exceed your service level agreements (SLA’s). The discussion around object store is always an interesting one as organizations are still learning to navigate the murky waters of the cloud, given some of those hidden fees, security hazards, and how it is really meant to be used so that it doesn’t break the bank. Finally, we will discuss the latest ransomware tactics leveraged by criminals and why they are after your backup infrastructure. This and much more, and we hope you can join us.

Register Now. You can register for our virtual sessions at VirtualQ I Protect & Archive .

To view our Partner blog, click here

What’s Your Take on Video and Unstructured Data?

CMMA Blog

It’s the age-old challenge for IT organizations and professionals – how to best protect digital content and information to ensure it’s available when needed, and all within budget.

And compounding the pressure to get it right is the accelerating proliferation of data. There are of course different types of data, so knowing which type needs to be architected is a logical starting place. Let’s begin with structured versus unstructured data. 

If you are like the majority of IT users, you are concerned with unstructured data, which is comprised of file and object storage and is expected to grow at an ever-increasing rate.

In fact, IDC’s Worldwide Global DataSphere Forecast, 2019–2023 indicates that content created and replicated related to entertainment continues to be the largest category of data being generated.

This type of data and files are therefore much larger. They are also much harder to search, but also contain more information, and possibly more insight. Conversely, structured data by its very nature is defined and formatted with a specified structure. This makes it easier to store, manage, and search.

So what is driving this sharpening growth curve? It is because of what comprises unstructured data, what makes it up, and its importance in today’s world and our culture. One of the most common types of unstructured data is video and video-like content. And of course, we see all around us, the constant barrage of video content from gaming, social media, box office blowouts, informercials – the list is endless. As examples of industries that are video-content centric, I’m sure what comes quickly to mind includes broadcast, movie and television studios, sports media, animation… the fact is, video surrounds our daily lives from every angle! 

Entertainment generates the majority of content. But consider some other sources of unstructured data that you are likely familiar with, but maybe aren’t top of mind. For example, corporate videos, like those used for trainings, marketing, and teaching. Also within health sciences, video is highly integrated to provide better health care, such as telemedicine, which is widely used today, image-based health records, medical instruction purposes – all of these high-res image files must be secured and available for ongoing access. And one other very important source where video is now ubiquitous is video surveillance, which is leveraged by all industries today running a variety of security workloads.  

These are just a few examples of the digital content that exist, and more importantly, will be created at an accelerated rate. They also provide a good example of the type and size of these files, and why they can’t be stored or protected in the same manner as structured files. This makes it a bit more challenging when architecting and choosing the best information-management infrastructure to handle your specific requirements. 

Efficiently managing all of this digital content and information requires you to think differently about the infrastructure for this big unstructured data. The good news is that this also provides organizations the opportunity to make their infrastructure future-proof with key considerations.

There are long-term advantages to digitally transform your video infrastructure. Understanding of the types of unstructured data that needs to be protected, where it is in its lifecycle, and your organization’s requirements for access to those files allows you to begin this transformation process. There are some additional considerations[1] to factor in your planning:

•             IT projects alignment

•             Cost and efficiency

•             Analytics and governance

•             Mitigating risk

To be best equipped for future-proofing your unstructured data infrastructure and best practices for managing it, the first step is to understand the trends for video and video-like data, the types of files, their usage, and where in the workflow your content is located.

If you’re interested in learning more and understanding these trends and factors, so that you can stay ahead of the digital content tidal wave, we invite you to download for free, the IDC InfoBrief: Storage System Considerations in the Digital Era .  

[1] IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Quantum, Storage System Considerations in the Digital Era, April, 2020.

To view our Partner blog, click here

Why Density Matters in your Data Protection Strategy

CMMA Blog

Generally speaking, higher density is more desirable – any way you look at it. This is true because more data can be stored in the same physical space. The demands in the data center to retain, secure, and store data to meet compliance requirements is a constant factor. IDC forecasts that by 2025, more than 7 .5 ZB will be stored and dealt with. A good percentage of that data may need to be kept as-long-as forever. When your data center is running out of footprint, what do you do?

Get a high-performing, super dense deduplication appliance.

Choosing the right purpose-built-backup-appliance (PBBA) can be confusing with so many options in the marketplace. While I’m certain the first thing that popped in your mind was, “we can leverage the cloud,” I say that’s great, but certain types of data must be kept on-premise inside the four walls of a data center. This could be data requiring security or special handling, such as trade secrets, customer lists, highest security financial transaction, classified information, just to name a few. Of the data that can leave your four walls and be replicated offsite, it shouldn’t be replicated in its raw format when possible.

A purpose-built backup-appliance does an excellent job, and many vary in its effectiveness. However, they are built to replicate, encrypt, and have full-hardware redundancy, and in some cases, have an integrated path to tape for cold storage. These are some of the standard features, keeping costs low and predictable. (We will get into dedupe ratios in another blog). For now, research states, data will continue to explode. The combination of HDDs + deduplication will excel at reducing costs, and the more effective the data reduction, the lower your TCO will be. Ultimately, that is the goal. An enterprise PBBA will not only give you the performance to meet your RTO/RPO and help you in your drive to zero, but it will be completely compatible with all leading backup software and offer the least disruptive scalability like capacity-on-demand options.

Quantum’s DXi9000 High-Density chassis comes loaded with 12 TB HDDs. This means MORE density footprint + HD chassis and lower power and cooling in enterprise space. DXi9000 is a true enterprise-scale disk backup system. It provides industry leading performance of +37 TB per hour and scales over 20 PB logical capacity all in a 10U!  

To view our Partner blog, click here