Enriched data delivers insights to drive the business forward, faster than ever before.
The 44th IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet with Jamie Lerner, Chairman and CEO, Eric Bassier, Sr. Director Product Marketing, Brian Pawlowski, Chief Development Officer, Bruno Hald, VP and GM, Secondary Storage, and Natasha Beckley, CMO at Quantum.
Quantum's business is being driven by a fundamental shift in the role of data that is driving digital transformation. Mostly it's video and images. 90% of all data created now is unstructured.
Today, automobiles are a function of data rather than metal and production. Companies are using data to build products and they need storage, learning, and analysis to be successful. They require an end-to-end platform for dealing with the movement, analysis, and storage of data.
Quantum is transforming through a series of acquisitions and an accelerated pace of innovation. They have evolved from a hardware company to a platform company. As enterprises need metadata to keep track of images and files, they are moving from hardware to the cloud with everything containerized and having the ability to run on any hardware and any cloud. Quantum is providing suites of containers for clients to put their data on the clouds they prefer.
Quantum is the leader in hyper-scale storage archives. They have partnered with the world's largest cloud providers to build exabyte-scale storage clouds deployed in hyper-scale data centers around the world.
Hardware to Platform Transition
Previously Quantum's StorNext shipped in 100 boxes and required multiple servers on a SAN. Today it ships ready to run in a single appliance. It used to require multiple management tools and GUIs. Today, they have complete management GUIs, and performance monitoring on-premise and in the cloud. Seven sign-ons have been replaced with a single sign-on.
The solution portfolio has evolved from on-prem data storage to also include public cloud data storage, asset management, integrated workflows, hybrid cloud data management, and data enrichment. It will soon be available to do all this from the cloud for a work-from-anywhere experience.
They are the leader in solutions for video and unstructured data with software to index, analyze, and enrich video and image data. They provide primary storage systems for high-speed data ingest and capture as well as secondary storage systems for large-scale data storage, data and cyber protection, and active and deep archives.
The Software Difference
Managing big unstructured data remain an unsolved challenge:
78% of organizations do not store data on primary storage for the amount of time they would like to
56% say they keep data on high-cost storage too long
88% say retaining more data longer is an avenue for greater business value creation
89% say more automated tiering of data could save them substantial money
Quantum's goal is to make everything easy. They are innovating at a rapid pace with the difference being their software.
Data is Mobile
Data is created, analyzed, and captured by airlines, movies, medical facilities, security, medical imaging, automated vehicles, and more.
Data is cataloged, worked on, analyzed, and distributed. Keys to success are speed of ingestion and processing, enabling collaboration (catalog, classify, tag), and the orchestration of data movement.
Data is preserved and protected forever. Keys to success are massive scalability, cost-effective storage, and protection for decades, accessing and re-using, as well as cyber-resilience.
Core Challenge
Quantum's goal is to make it easy for companies to buy, deploy, manage, upgrade, and service. They are providing content discovery with Quantum CatDV and NVIDIA AI tools. This enables users to index their content, convert audio to text, and add tremendous value to existing data.
StorNext offers the best streaming performance. It is now virtualized, containerized, and cloud-ready. The management layer and APIs have been containerized in a Docker environment. This enables easy upgrades and fast delivery of new features and capabilities. File services, data services, and block services run in VMs and containers on a single software-defined platform.
The unified surveillance platform (USP) software simplifies video recording infrastructure. The unified server and storage cluster consolidate many network video recorders (NVRs) and other applications into a single unified platform. Smart NVRs can run multiple applications consolidating many NVRs into a single "smart" NVR server.
Quantum is making the first and only object storage software that can run on disk or tape. It has a single namespace across disk and tape, 1Mx better data durability, up to 40% better storage efficiency, it scales to exabytes and billions of objects, it's available as-a-service with no data access fees, and is 80% less expensive than competing object stores
Scalar i6H services technology is a tape storage system for hyper-scale and exabyte-scale archive environments to deliver a better CX. It is especially popular for video in entertainment and communications. It provides asset management and workflow orchestration, high speed, highly available, collaborative shared storage, and large-scale, cyber-resilient content archiving
Use Cases
There are several areas where Quantum is gaining a lot of traction with its new solutions:
Video for entertainment and communications. Asset management and workflow orchestration enable editors, colorists, reviewers, and VFX and CGI professionals to spend more time creating content and less time looking for and managing content. High-speed, highly-available collaborative shared storage enables render and analytics to ingest and edit high-res content with fast streaming performance. Large-scale, cyber-resilient content archiving enables users to find new ways to access, protect, and monetize archived content.
Video surveillance recording and retention. Smart NVRs for edge deployments and video recording enable security personnel to capture hundreds to thousands of high-res camera feeds 24x7 with no frame loss. Resilient unified server and storage platforms consolidate and simplify video recording infrastructure on a highly resilient platform. Reliable, low-cost storage for long-term retention via object, tape, or public cloud addresses long-term retention requirements at the lowest cost.
Managing and archiving unstructured data. Scale-out file and object storage systems enable scientists and researchers to use big unstructured data to accelerate digital transformation. Data management across flash, disk, tape, and cloud reduces infrastructure costs by 50%+ relative to alternate file and object solutions. Exa-scale, cyber-resilient data archiving preserves and protects unstructured data for decades.
Data and cyber-protection. ActiveScale object storage with versioning and object locking. DXi backup appliances for high-speed backup and replication with secure snapshots. Scalar tape storage for the lowest cost, most secure tape storage for long-term archiving, and cyber-resilient infrastructure.
End-to-end solutions for video and unstructured data. Popular at several major universities for backup and cyber-protection of the IT department, campus surveillance, archive research data, and managing athletics department content.