Have you seen the t-shirts? If you live in Seattle, they can be spotted in popular happy hour spots worn proudly by the millennials of tech.

The Galactic Empire needed a way to squash the rebellion manifesting across its galaxies. It decided to design the Death Star, which conveniently wipes out planets one at a time, striking terror into the hearts of those thinking of raising their hands with the Rebel Alliance against the Empire. When the Galactic Empire needed a secure way to store the schematics for the Death Star, it turned to a technology that transcends both time and space—the tape drive. Tape offers the Empire an offline backup copy for protection against both ransomware and rebels with the added ability to physically store it at a data center on an offsite planet. Unfortunately for the Empire, too much faith in the dark side and too little faith in IT security resulted in the tape being stolen and the Death Star being exploited for its minor design flaw.

If so, you aren’t alone. We find ourselves in more and more conversations with companies that are feeling angst about their Isilon purchase—for a multitude of reasons. In fact, in a recent survey we conducted, 43% of respondents evaluated Isilon before purchasing a Quantum StorNext® solution. This tells us that although Isilon has a strong presence in the market, it doesn’t deliver the workflow capabilities that media and entertainment companies actually need in a storage system: high performance, easy access, and low cost.

What do users want from their surveillance system? Ask any security professional, and you will hear answers like these: sharp, high quality images; widespread camera coverage; real-time analytics; fast search and retrieval of video footage with minimal, if any, intervention from people in the information technology department.

Color correction plays a critical role in post-production. Matching clips captured from multiple cameras, fixing problems that occurred while shooting, and applying artistic color grading to projects are essential for delivering high-quality content that engages audiences.

There’s no doubt that post-production and animation/visual effects (VFX) studios need strong storage performance for a variety of demanding tasks. Facing extremely tight deadlines, your editors, colorists, artists, and other team members need a responsive experience—even as they work with multiple streams of large 4K media files at high frame rates.

This Tuesday marked the third Amazon Prime Day, a self-proclaimed holiday which analysts estimated would equate to $1 billion in sales for Amazon in online retail. Analysts predicted a 55% increase over 2016 results. Amazon outperformed with a 60% increase in sales—the largest shopping day in its history. I’ll admit I participated with the purchase of a new blender, and I can’t wait for it to arrive in Amazon’s promised three-day delivery window.

Video technology is evolving at lightning speed. Now that high definition is ubiquitous, there’s an ever-growing demand for the high picture quality and smooth motion associated with 4K ultra-high-definition (UHD) video formats. An increasing number of production houses have made the switch to 4K workflows—and if your team isn’t already working in 4K, it’s only a matter of time before it’s part of your portfolio.

As companies accelerate their development efforts for self-driving cars and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), they are expanding the size of their vehicle test fleets. And with each vehicle generating 2 PB or more of data annually, these companies need a good data management plan to support this large and rapidly growing volume of data.

The latest international cyberattack struck overnight affecting large European companies, such as Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft, pharmaceutical company Merck, and Danish shipping company Maersk. This latest version of ransomware is similar to the WannaCry attacks which occurred just last month and affected tens of thousands of machines.

Whether you’re creating customer-facing product videos for your marketing team or training videos for sales, your in-house video production team needs to deliver high-quality media that maximizes the viewers’ interest and engagement. For now, you might be delivering that video in high-definition (HD) or even standard-definition (SD) format. But you can see the future—and the future is 4K.

Visual effects (VFX) and post-production studios are facing rapidly rising demand for compelling visual content. To boost audience excitement and heighten engagement, directors and producers are incorporating an increasing number of VFX shots into their projects. Meanwhile, consumer interest in more immersive experiences are opening doors for VFX and post-production studios to investigate virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 360-degree video, and other innovative technologies.

May and June have been an active time for Quantum’s technical workflow solutions team as we wind down from the Bio-IT World Conference in Boston and prepare for the ISC high-performance computing (HPC) show coming up later this month in Frankfurt.