Data stewardship has always mattered.  We humans have been recording valuable data for thousands of years—all we have to do is look at the Lascaux cave paintings in southwestern France for images that are believed to be over 17,000 years old. And sometimes, we have even invested in beautiful monuments to store our data repositories and to symbolize the knowledge within. Observing, capturing, and preserving information about this planet are behaviors that seem to be wired into our DNA.

The Radcliffe Camera at the Bodleian Library at Oxford is one such beautiful monument to data stewardship. This image of the Bodleian—which I discovered through Fodor’s 20 Most Stunning Libraries—makes me stop and marvel, not only at the curves of the dome and the lines of the columns, but at the determination of the architects and builders who spent over 100 years constructing this beauty, to store and protect a …

4K, 4K, 4K. Everyone is talking 4K at the NAB Show. Netflix announced that it’s now streaming 4K versions of its original series “House of Cards” and select documentaries. AJA announced 4K CION, its first cinema camera, while JVC announced that its first 4K movie cameras will include one for flying drones. And virtually every storage vendor is claiming to offer a solution for 4K workflows. But what’s the fine print on their 4K workflow storage claims?

4K technically is just a frame size–4096 pixels×2160 lines for cinema or 3840×2160 for consumer–but to achieve the quality that people expect from 4K, you need more than just a high-resolution image. You also need a frame rate of 24 frames per second or greater, and a compression codec that doesn’t degrade the 4K image quality.

The dirty little secret is that it’s really hard to stream 4K content at this rate without …

Content production had never been a simple process, but the number of moving parts and scale involved has grown to global proportions. Even a low-budget film might shoot in the rainforest in Costa Rica, edit in Vancouver, add visual effects in Korea, color-correct in Toronto, and finish in Hollywood. At the same time, there’s more pressure to transcode and deliver content worldwide on more platforms that ever before. All of this without the added complexity of making and transmitting duplicate copies between remote teams.

That’s where cutting edge storage technologies and workflow automation tools head to the cloud with StorNext in the Cloud. StorNext in the Cloud lets you use the same workflows you use today, but now you and your team can work remotely, sharing content stored on Quantum’s Lattus object storage with all the scalability, flexibility and security you need, automatically managed by StorNext Storage Manager. With …

Data protection strategies have been in a state of accelerated evolution over the last five years. I hear this confirmed regularly by customers describing their implementation stories with Quantum, as well as by the industry analysts that we meet with to discuss our latest product innovations. ESG’s Jason Buffington is one of those analysts that we talk with often, and it’s always interesting to see how ESG’s research squares against what we’re seeing in data centers. Jason’s latest video blog about modernizing data protection – 8 Suggestions for Every Data Protection Strategy – highlights ESG research that resonated with me in a number of respects.

“Data protection is more than backup.”  We’ve been saying this for a long time, particularly as VMs have proliferated and Quantum’s DXi-Series and vmPRO products combine to provide the kind of backup + snapshot + replication environment that ESG’s research describes as the dominant trend.…

In Newtonian mechanics, momentum has a direction as a well as magnitude.  If Newton was correct, and I am going to go out on a limb here and assume that to be the case, then the Powered by Quantum MSP Program has momentum, with positive direction and high magnitude.  Over the past couple of weeks, Quantum has successfully created partnerships with a number of MSPs that deliver their own cloud backup service powered by Quantum technology. Just this month we added two new MSPs to the roster, Elanity Network Partner and Interconnekt.  These partners, scattered across the globe, have recognized the benefits that Quantum solutions can bring to not only their customers but also to their bottom line.

Cloud is certainly front and center for a lot of the industry. Not an earth shattering statement, I know. There are a lot of technology providers offering cloud based services and …

As a member of the enterprise backup/archive industry for almost 18 years now, I feel like I have the right to consider myself a member of the backup community.  So I have to ask the question:  “Why are we so SLOW to adopt the new technologies that can most help us?”

If you’ve done the math, it was almost 8 years from the initial shipment of the first deduplication appliances in 2003 before this key technology began to really gain adoption.   An InfoWeek survey showed that as late as 2011, only 32% of surveyed users were utilizing the technology.  That’s a long time to wait to get what we all now know is incredible value.

Now granted, when we first started selling deduplication, the technology did seem a bit like magic.  I remember when I was first approached by a headhunter asking me to come to Southern California to take …

Contrary to popular belief, how you archive matters more than what or why you archive. For the broad market, the notion of non-archived data has become antiquated. Getting rid of old data means taking the time or investing in resources required to decide what data can be deleted, and most data managers do not feel comfortable making those decisions. So today virtually everything is being stored forever, generating huge repositories of data and content, and creating a great urgency to establish a data storage architecture that will thrive in this new “store everything forever” era.

Disk and Tape Uses Now Overlap – Providing More Choices

Questions of what and why to archive mattered a lot more when content owners and data managers had to make substantial trade-offs between primary storage and archive storage. Disk was used for primary storage and tape was used for archive. Primary disk was very expensive …

While I have learned quite a number of lessons over the years, probably one of the greatest is from Albert Einstein when he said: “Strive to make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Why should we  make things overly complex and harder than they need to be when it is so much easier and efficient to just keep it simple?

With the introduction of our new DXi4701 dedupe appliance, we’ve done just that. The DXi4701 is our new extensible deduplication platform that scales with simplicity.

When I say it “scales with simplicity”, what does that mean?

Well, the DXi4701 provides:

• Highest Efficiency | Single platform that enables significant power and footprint savings
• Pay-as-You-Grow Scalability | Simple, predictable & easy-to-install storage capacity
• Broadest Capacity Range | One platform supports all entry to midrange configurations
• Ease-of-Use | Single platform that enables significant time and money savings

 …

This article originally appeared on Wired Magazine’s Innovation Insights. 

With the start of the new year, it’s time once again for those of us in enterprise storage to look ahead and offer our predictions for what the industry will see in 2014. So without further ado, here are ten trends that will have a big impact in the coming year:

1) Time to Retire the “Primary” from Primary Storage – With the continued growth of data and increased strategic value of connecting historical data with new data, primary storage is no longer the main game in town. Getting data off expensive primary storage, while keeping it readily accessible, will take on greater importance. As a result, there will be increased focus on tiered storage, with new technologies such as next generation object storage and LTFS being widely adopted.

2) VM Data: “Just Let Me Be Me” – Look for a …

I know a lot of folks think the big contest this time of year is the Super Bowl playoffs. In Quantum’s Denver, Bay Area and Seattle offices we’re sporting the colors of the Broncos, 49ers and Seahawks, with just a bit of friendly trash talk to kick off conference calls. Perhaps you know someone rooting for New England – I don’t.  But if you care about data storage, the other big contest is Storage Magazine’s Product of the Year Awards. The award serves as an annual reminder of what the storage community found important, promising, and profitable.

This year’s award finalists include a cross-section of Quantum products spanning scale-out shared storage and the data center, highlighting the breadth of innovation from the company over the last year. For 2013, four Quantum products – more than any other vendor among the finalists – have been selected in three award categories.

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The season of parties is upon us, and there was a little extra celebrating going on in Quantum’s UK office after Quantum took home “Vendor’s Reseller Channel Program of the Year” at the 2013 Storage Virtualisation Cloud (SVC) Awards. Chris Bowring, Channel Sales Director for Northern Europe, was there to accept the award from SVC award manager Carly Stephens at the gala in London.

Quantum has been a regular at the SVC Awards – last year the DXi V1000 virtual deduplication appliance won “Virtualization Product of the Year”, which was won the year prior by vmPRO 4000. This year, in addition to the channel program award, Quantum received honorable mentions for Lattus Object Storage in the Tiered Storage Product of the Year category, as well as Private Sector Storage Project of the Year for work with post-production studio Framestore.

It’s great to see the value of the Quantum …

Anybody who’s read Moneyball or seen the movie knows that succeeding in sports today involves winning the analytics contest just as much as competing on the field, court or ice.  This is a trend that’s changed the way video is used in both professional and collegiate athletics, and we’re seeing the effects everywhere: basketball, football, baseball, hockey, even motor sports and martial arts.

Video has long been a staple of sports—it’s used for scouting, game prep, recruiting and promotion, as well as broadcasting—but two factors are making it different now.  One is the technology for analyzing what’s on video.  One of the biggest trends in sports is motion analysis, which combines special analytics applications and video to help players improve their performance by breaking down and evaluating their movements.  In addition to motion analysis technology, there are also now programs that can comb through years of footage to find …

This is a good time of the year to both reflect and look forward. Quantum’s Senior Vice President of Cloud Solutions Henrik Rosendahl has been busy doing a bit of both lately.

Henrik recently joined his friend Doug Brown with DABCC Radio for a podcast conversation covering a range of topics. The two discuss Object Storage and its potential to provide relief to data growth and explore the need for tiered storage. Henrik reacts to the failure of Nirvanix, and notes how the conversation about cloud has shifted in its wake, particularly as companies weigh public vs. private cloud options. In addition, Henrik discusses how MSPs and VARs are adding BaaS to their portfolios and emerging as players in the cloud space.

Then, in Virtual Strategy Magazine, Henrik offers his forecast for 2014. Among his predictions, Henrik touches on object storage as an alternative to primary storage, the challenges …

Astronomers searching for life outside of our solar system speak of The Goldilocks Zone – the region around a star where conditions are suitable for sustaining life: not too close and hot, and not too distant and cold. Initially these “just right” conditions appeared to be almost impossibly rare, but researchers over the years have found organisms that can exist in more conditions than previously imagined. It turns out that the Goldilocks Zone is wider than we thought, increasing the possibility of finding other planets capable of sustaining life.

Today a similar recognition is happening in data centers. While IT has long thought of data storage as “hot” and requiring immediate access in flash memory or primary disk, or “cold” and suitable for backup and archive to tape, there weren’t many choices for a “warm” tier of data that required a more nuanced cost/latency balance. The expanding range of choices …

Few things come along that alter the world of filesystems and make them exciting, especially for folks in the Media and Entertainment industry. Especially with the multitude of distractions, tight turn-around schedules, and little budget. That’s why Quantum dove deep into their treasured StorNext product to revolutionize and re-invent what can be considered the most modern and developed shared filesystem to date: StorNext 5.

The vast majority of the enhancements were down on the very low level of the metadata and journaling section, but this is not to be overlooked as trivial or a “nice to have.” The effects made to this layer have profound consequences to the overall system performance and scalability on a massive level. Looking at this holistically we can see a handful of the most major changes: The ability for multithreaded metadata operations, new layering of extents on a contiguous range of blocks, online metadata …