Posted by Watershed moments. Nearly every person, company, industry, and nation will have a handful over the course of their history. Some, like walking on the moon, involve whole nations and have the ability to influence the future of the entire world. Others can be more personal, such as achieving a life-long dream, that only affects the individual and their first-degree connections. But no matter how many people they affect, all watershed moments are special. Not only are they rare and have the power to transform, inherently they mark a point at which things will never be the same.
Today is one of these moments for Quantum and our customer ecosystem. Today we are launching our new F-Series NVMe storage platform, an ultra-fast, highly available storage array designed for studio editing, rendering, and other performance-intensive workloads. It uses NVMe flash drives for lightning fast performance – 3 to 5 times higher throughput than a traditional SSD appliance –as well as RDMA networking technology to provide direct access between workstations and the NVMe storage devices. And with no single point of failure, it provides maximum availability for mission-critical applications and production processes. No matter which way you look at it, for our customers that implement this box in their workflow, they’re going to see an immediate, and highly significant impact.
The first F-Series product out of the gate will be our F2000. This compact 2U purpose-built NVMe appliance will hold up to 24 dual-ported NVMe drives and is available in three capacity points from 46TB to 184TB.
That in itself would be a major announcement. However, the story today goes one step deeper and gets even better. The F-Series will be the first storage product from Quantum based on our new Cloud Storage Platform, a software-defined block storage stack tuned specifically for video and video-like data. To create this new storage platform, we applied years of experience working with video, plus years of experience deploying and supporting software-defined storage architectures. So not only is it future-proof, but it also eliminates data services unrelated to video while enhancing critical capabilities such as data protection, networking and block interfaces. Here is a conceptual drawing of the software stack:
Finally, for the cherry on top of the proverbial sundae here, all this is tightly integrated with StorNext, further boosting its end-to-end storage capabilities. As many of our customers know, StorNext improves collaboration through comprehensive multi-protocol access, protects data through advanced replication and copy functionality, and offers automated tiering of data to capacity-optimized storage. Designed from the beginning to work in a StorNext global namespace, customers will be able to easily implement an F-Series appliance into their existing workflows, similar to the below:
Ultimately, this will allow customers to reduce total cost of ownership and maximize the value of content across its entire life-cycle for cutting edge workflows across post-production, sports video, and rendering.
So at least in my book, April 4th, 2019 marks a watershed moment for Quantum. In many ways, this new platform represents our transformation to becoming the industry specialist in preserving, protecting, and helping customers derive more value from their video and video-like data. The F-Series is just the start of this new chapter in the company’s history. In the coming months, we’ll have even more exciting product introductions that will further build on this theme and the technology we have launched today.
To discover more about this advanced NVMe solution, please visit our F-Series webpage where you will find further details on the product, its unique software architecture, and the use cases that will benefit most from its adoption. Or, check out our new NVMe eBook!
Or even better, stop by our booth at this year’s NAB – we’ll be at SL4409. We will be having multiple workstations running real-time color grading, finishing, and rendering operations that are supported by the F2000, and with over 25GB/s streaming performance, it’s going to be quite the modern technical marvel to behold. I look forward to seeing you there!