StorNext is Hardware
You might know StorNext for its software: the StorNext File System and StorNext Storage Manager. But Quantum also offers StorNext hardware appliances for all major software components, so StorNext speed, scalability and security comes right in the box. So, if you want faster setup with less complexity, check out our StorNext appliances. And StorNext is still available as software for those who want to “roll their own” solution.

StorNext is Fast over Ethernet
You might know that StorNext offers SAN connections with the unmatched streaming performance to handle high resolution workflows without dropping frames. But StorNext also offers blazing fast connections over Ethernet that leave NFS and CIFS in the dust. We call it the StorNext G300 Gateway appliance—and it’s our own protocol built on top of IP that moves Big Data files fast enough for intense operations like transcoding and rendering.

StorNext Archives Live Forever
You might know that StorNext Storage Manager migrates files from disk to tape so that your archives can grow indefinitely without blowing your budget. What you might not know is that the StorNext AEL Archive appliance can do integrity checks and migrate files from tapes that are starting to go bad to fresh new tapes. That way your archive data can live forever.

The Brains of StorNext Is Getting Smarter
You might know that Quantum announced its first metadata appliance, the StorNext M330 at Broadcast Asia last summer. But unless you stopped by Quantum’s booth at NAB 2012, you might not know that this summer we’ll ship a more powerful “big brother” to the StorNext M330. The new metadata appliance will offer everything the StorNext M330 does, plus a major boost in performance and scalability and some bonus software features.

StorNext is Everywhere
You might think you know everything about StorNext, except that you’re already using it. StorNext powers over a dozen leading storage solutions for media and entertainment today, including EVS, DDN, Autodesk, HP, NetApp, DVS and Dalet. Peel back the covers of top products from these industry powerhouses and you’ll find a StorNext file system or archive doing some heavy lifting.

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This was the first year in a while that Quantum hosted a presentation theater in its NAB booth (#SL5024) highlighting a number of customer and partner demonstrations (all available on our NAB hub page).

Bill Harris from Telestream described and demonstrated the new multi-camera live video capture and analysis workflow used at NASCAR with Telestream’s new Pipeline Replay product. The 18-camera deployment depends on the StorNext File System underneath to provide fast, immediate access to the live content.

Christy King, VP of Digital Technology R&D at Zuffa, which is the parent company of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), described UFC’s multi-vendor video production environment, integrating content editing, transcoding, streamlined archival and delivery solutions for this mixed-martial-arts sporting league. Levels Beyond’s Reach Engine running on top of the StorNext File System, StorNext archive software and StorNext Partial File Retrieval forms the foundation of UFC’s production workflow.

Declan Wood, who works with Quantum in the UK, showed an actual proxy-based workflow highlighting the benefits of a tiered storage architecture for a Media Asset Management-based Archive, where high resolution assets are stored on tape and lower resolution “proxies” are stored on disk.

Dalet and OpenText described broadcast and enterprise asset management, respectively, and how StorNext tiered data software can make LTO tape or bulk disk an integral part of the active workflow while protecting content long-term. Dalet’s Raoul Cospen talked about the importance of the right storage for a MAM application, while Brad Christus and John Price from OpenText highlighted storage considerations for F500 enterprises implementing global brand management solutions that incorporate video.

Additional presentations included Janae Lee, SVP of Filesystem and Archive for Quantum, on “Managing Data in the World of Content Shift,” and live demonstrations of the new Scalar LTFS appliance and the complete StorNext appliance family.

It was an exciting and educational week. For those who couldn’t make it, you can view all the videos and fun over at our NAB hubpage.

The benefits of data archiving are explained a new whitepaper from Quantum: Big Data: Managing Explosive Growth (The Importance of Tiered Storage). As Eric Bassier, director of Quantum’s tape automation product line, explains, “Most companies perform backups, but not as many companies today are truly archiving their data. Industries like media and entertainment, which are dealing with such massive amounts of digital data that they just can’t keep it all on disk, are ahead of the broader market.”

The white paper explains how a tiered storage strategy can help organizations face the challenges of exponential data growth (up to 30 percent annually according to Gartner), and stricter regulations on the type of data they gather and how it must be stored. This, coupled with budget constraints, makes it imperative for organizations to get a handle on their backup and data archiving strategy, and to implement the most automated and reliable systems they can afford.

In addition to outlining the benefits of data archiving, the paper also provides an understanding of how Quantum archiving solutions, including StorNext data management software, the Scalar i6000 tape library and the StorNext AEL Archive, can give organizations the features they need to safely and easily implement a comprehensive archiving strategy.

If you’re looking for a more in-depth dive into the benefits and ROI of data archiving, you can find a cost-benefit analysis in a second white paper: Save Time and Money with Quantum’s Integrated Archiving Solution. For this paper, Quantum collaborated with Case Study Forum, an independent research organization, to perform an objective study of the financial returns generated by using StorNext Data Management Software and Scalar Tape Libraries for data archiving. The analysis is based on an enterprise that generates and manages a large amount of data – 250 terabytes with 61% annual growth – with file sizes ranging from 16K to 10GB and an average file size of more than 5MB. It would also leverage a high-performance SAN file system infrastructure.

The analysis compares the costs of using primary disk storage for both backup and archive data, versus using an integrated Quantum StorNext and Scalar tape solution to archive 80% of the data. Based on a projected five year period, the analysis shows numerous financial benefits including:

- A return on investment of 482% within 10 months
- A savings of more than $3.7 million in media costs
- Productivity and workflow savings of more than $1.3 million
- Energy savings of nearly $29,000
- A cumulative projected $4,186,276 in net benefits compared to disk storage

Whether the challenge is large file sizes or exponential data growth, most organizations will benefit from augmenting their backup systems with data archiving capabilities. If you still have questions about archiving data after reviewing these two papers, feel free to leave a question on the blog or contact the Quantum team for more information.

We have just announced what I think is a truly innovative product with functionality that is going to make a meaningful difference to organizations managing data protection for physical, virtual and cloud environments. The storage associated with these multiple approaches is complex, and having a ubiquitous set of data protection technologies that can make protection and disaster recovery a stable backbone of the infrastructure is key to what we do here at Quantum.

The new DXiV1000 is a fully functional DXi deduplication product, released as a virtual appliance – simple and easy to use whether at a small site, a data center, or in the cloud. This single technology approach allows us to deploy the same functionality at multiple points in the ecosystem, all replication compatible, all with full deduplication capabilities that dramatically reduce the amount of time protecting and transferring data across the network.

For me, data protection is something that should be as least a painful an experience as possible. For a distributed enterprise environment, maybe a private cloud data protection solution is the answer. Maybe its a combination of virtual appliances in those 1500 stores and centralized physical appliances in a couple of data centers, with a final layer of protection on tape; or maybe that final layer of protection is in the cloud; or maybe that’s where it goes first. We are unique in enabling the delivery of all that and more with a single compatible architecture that not only has the best return on investment, but provides the most flexible deployment over time.

You have to be certain about your data protection infrastructure. And you have to be certain that an investment in a set of technologies is going to be applicable as your business needs change. I’m personally excited about the technology innovation that Quantum is delivering today to address this set of challenges in a very real and practical way; and how we’ll continue to evolve our technology over time to address problems that are only just coming into focus.

For more information, visit our hub page.

Back in June of last year Quantum acquired a company called Pancetera, whose technology addressed some of the problems IT was facing and continues to face today with regard to protecting virtualized environments. A short time after the acquisition Quantum introduced its first product using Pancetera technology – Quantum vmPRO 4000, an integrated solution to help IT address data protection for virtual environments. You can read more about how vmPRO was recently voted SearchStorage Product of the Year in the Backup Hardware category, but I want to continue a bit more on the topic of Quantum’s strategy and where we are going in the future.

Before I joined Quantum, I was an industry analyst and Quantum was one of the companies I followed very closely. The Pancetera acquisition surprised me, but it made me think there is a lot more going on inside Quantum than even I knew as an analyst. Now, as the CTE (Chief Technology Evangelist) for Quantum, I can tell you for a fact there are a great number of things going on inside Quantum that will address current IT challenges in the near future.

So, who is Quantum? I think this is a good place to start. Who are we and why should you listen?

I ask this question often of customers and channel partners. The response I get is varied. Those who know us well know our capabilities and our strengths. However, those who do not still believe we are the “disk drive company” or the “tape drive company.” Well, no, we aren’t the disk drive company or the tape drive company…but we used to be.

Like any 30 year old should, Quantum has matured and evolved. Today Quantum is a Big Data management and data protection company with solutions that extend from the data center to the cloud. Just as we recognized the importance of virtualization, we also see the value and significance of the cloud, today and in the future. As I have been quoted in a number of trade magazines, I believe the cloud will continue to find its relevance – initially with data protection, then subsequently supporting an availability strategy that helps IT deliver higher service level objectives when it comes to data, application and system availability.

Who is Quantum?

Quantum is a company worth keeping your eye on…we are moving fast over here and we are not done innovating. In fact, we’ll be announcing something in the very near future that will help IT take the next step in solving these ever present challenges, so stay tuned.

-Chapa signing off

Quantum vmPRO’s recent award for Product of the Year in the Backup Hardware category by SearchStorage, extends Quantum’s well-established leadership in traditional data protection to now include virtualization.

The short time between acquiring Pancetera in June of 2011, creating Quantum vmPRO and delivering it to the market clearly hit our strategic timeline and shows our customers the commitment we have to offering real solutions for the 21st century.

In the video below I talk about our win, and how the combination of Quantum vmPRO and Quantum DXi enables us to deliver a solution to meet our customers’ backup and disaster recovery requirements for both physical and virtual environments. It feels pretty good knowing we’re offering a solution that’s been judged by industry experts to be the best available today.

As many IT admins are learning, virtualization presents different challenges, especially when it comes to backup, disaster recovery and long-term retention of VMs. For one, VM data protection applications need to be able to backup and easily restore both data files (on a full and an incremental level) and the virtual machine operating system itself. A VM backup system also needs to be able to locate VM instances, whether or not they are active, and discover new ones automatically – both of which can be challenging given the pace with which VMs are often implemented and/or reassigned.

Traditional backup systems often fail to address these and other unique challenges of virtualization. For example, many applications use an image-level backup technique that ends up saving expired data and empty space, lengthening backup and restore times and creating larger file sizes than necessary.

There is also the issue of backup format. In addition to writing the backup copy in the proprietary format used by the backup system, VMs offer the option to write backed up data to disk. This can make the data more accessible and speed up recovery – but only if the backup data is written in a native file system format, which most traditional backup systems can’t do.

As a result of these and many more nuances presented by virtualized environments, Quantum has risen to the challenge with our vmPRO technology solutions. vmPRO addresses each of the issues above, including the ability to write data in a native file system format and proven reduction of backup file sizes (by as much as 75% in some cases). In addition, vmPRO integrates with vCenter through the vSphere API, enabling auto-discovery of VMs.

vmPRO also reduces the complexity and cost associated with backing up both physical and virtual environments through its ability to export a view of VM data to legacy backup systems. This approach gives admins the technical benefits of advanced VM-specific tools, while allowing them to use a familiar backup system interface and follow established policies for backed up data.

You can learn more about Quantum’s vmPRO solutions on our site. You might also be interested in the findings from the recent Tolly Group lab evaluation of vmPRO. As always, feel free to leave a question or comment here for TeamQ!

The question is important to us because Quantum is raising its game in VM data protection, and vmPRO is Exhibit A as evidence of the increase in resources the company is applying to deliver a competitive solution to the market. And you may have noticed that with all the buzz about private cloud implementations, IT managers are trying to get a handle on the growing complexity of data backup and storage while they address spiraling storage costs and the need to optimize network performance. The data reduction that deduplication enables is what makes cloud storage for VMs feasible. vmPRO is in the sweet spot for solving a problem a lot of people are talking about – that’s why it was selected as a finalist in the Backup Hardware category of the Storage Magazine/SearchStorage.com 2011 Products of the Year award.

Tolly published their lab findings [pdf] today. They explored ease of use, management, data reduction, site replication, ease of integration, optimized disk and network I/O, and overall flexibility. The verdict? According to Tolly Group’s founder, Kevin Tolly, “With its extensive functionality, coupled with the intuitive configuration and management, vmPRO solutions provide a solid foundation for any organization looking to extend data protection to virtual environments or optimize existing disaster recovery objectives.”

So what does vmPRO get for surviving all this flogging? It gets this badge.

Discussion Forum for sharing StorNext tips, ideas and questions with other community members.

Personal Profiles to introduce yourself to community members, share information about your StorNext environment and even upload blog posts.

Social Networking features that enable you to easily connect with other community members and invite others to join the community.

Convenient Links to StorNext resources, blog posts and tweets — and, coming soon, sneak peek perks — so you can stay in the loop on StorNext updates and news.

What you won’t find on the StorNext Community Forum is a bunch of ads or marketing jargon. Sure, you’ll see a few Quantum team members, but they’re on the forum to answer questions and provide insight — not to sell you on a product you already believe in and use.

To celebrate the launch, we’re offering $5 gift cards to the first 50 people who register on the site (excluding Quantum employees), plus $5 gift cards for the first 50 people who start a meaningful thread, post a relevant comment, or complete their profile (including a photo).

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for the StorNext Community Forum now and start sharing!

Oh … and we a fun video to share: