If you’re in the media and entertainment industry, 4K is a term now nearly as ubiquitous as HD. And if your organization does post production, broadcast, or content distribution, odds are you are already working with 4K media, according to a new survey from Quantum and postPerspective.

Over the past month, I've been lucky enough to spend a lot of time out in the field – connecting with a lot of interesting customers at industry events and spending quality time with Quantum’s regional sales teams around the globe. One common theme across all of this seems to be a resurgence in interest in LTO technology, based on two dynamics and two use cases.

Requests for new video content are multiplying fast. Your company’s marketing group needs you to create product videos and customer success stories to support the next product launch. The events team wants you to post executive keynote addresses from an upcoming conference—preferably within a day after each talk is given. And as your company expands its salesforce, you need to produce a new series of training videos to bring team members up to speed.

It’s time to step up the 4K planning. More and more frequently your clients are asking for 4K video so they can meet end-user demand for ultra-high-definition content. Even if you’re still delivering some SD and HD video, moving to 4K workflows now can help you future-proof your work—you’ll be able to remaster your production files more easily in 4K tomorrow if you work in 4K today.

One of the things I like most about the technology industry is that it is characterized by a relentless quest for improvement. There is always something newer, faster and better right around the corner. Never a dull moment. And always the drive to be first and best.

Once again, World Backup Day upon us, which is a great reminder that you don’t want to be like the guy who almost lost Toy Story 2...or the one who sparked a massive outage in Amazon AWS, right?

At Quantum, we have been delivering both approaches for decades with our scale-out products, engineered for large and data-intensive workloads, and our scale-up approach for data protection. Why both? Because Data Protection and Production functions have different requirements.

The LTO Program announced yet another record year for LTO capacity shipments in 2017, with more than 108,000 PB of total compressed capacity shipped. That represents a 13% annual increase over 2016 and more than double the capacity shipped just four years ago, in 2013.

Thinking about adding a little flash to your workflow? You’re not alone. More and more, video production teams are incorporating flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) into their storage environment as a way to boost performance for key post-production tasks.

I recently found myself in need of a new vehicle. It wasn’t necessarily because my old one was breaking down or in bad shape. My situation had simply changed over time such that the car I now have no longer meets my needs. In my case, I needed more room for a growing family and wanted better gas mileage. Unfortunately, the car wasn’t designed to easily or inexpensively make those improvements. It also started to cost me a lot more to maintain. This got me thinking about the similarities with legacy scale-out NAS solutions.

As we head into the celebration of Valentine’s Day, we look to the heartfelt version of tape – with some surprising statistics on sales of cassette tapes in 2017. Did you know (according to Nielsen Music), US cassette sales had a 35% increase over 2016 with 174,000 sold. We accredit this trend to “hipster” artists bringing back an old trend to differentiate their record launches including Lil Uzi Vert’s Luv is Rage, DJ Khaled’s Grateful, and Lana Del Rey’s Lust for Life.

This is the story of Rook, an open source project that was built by many hands, fostered by Quantum Corporation developers and was accepted this week into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation where it can grow and deliver solid storage management capabilities to a much broader community.