Posted by Last week, I had the privilege of participating in a panel session entitled Future Production Trends: 8K, HDR, and AI in front of a packed auditorium at the Sports Tech Innovation Forum (organized by the brilliant BroadcastTech team). At the end of the session, an interesting question came up from the audience that asked the following: Given how hard technology vendors and broadcasters are working to provide their viewers with immersive content that puts them as close to the action as possible, are these same entities also making sure to provide their audiences all the tools necessary to easily find the content and configure the best experience on their home devices?
Essentially, the question was focused around the user interface for the consumer. Andy Beale, Chief Engineer at BT Sport, answered confidently that it is indeed something that BT is constantly thinking about for their viewers, but that BT needed to continually work closely with the vendor community to make sure this aspect was not only being thought through, but also resourced. In many ways, it was the kind of answer I believe the audience member was hoping for.
What I found most interesting is this question and response is closely aligned to a development stream that Quantum has been heavily investing in over the past year; not only is an efficient and modern UI important for the home consumer, it’s just as important to support the advanced operations of our customers. In fact, the development of more advanced GUIs is becoming more important than ever as we strive to provide transparency between what technology can do, and what we actually ask it to do. And as technology ecosystems are becoming more heterogeneous, they are simultaneously becoming more interdependent, so having a unified management interface is even more critical.
Double-clicking down on this thought, let’s transition to the practical implementation of the above as it relates to helping organizations more efficiently manage their storage infrastructure.
This week we are launching the latest release of our award-winning file system, StorNext 6.3.1. In addition to a number of small improvements to make the file system operate even more smoothly, we are also improving its capability to manage offline files. With Offline File Manager 2.0, in addition to giving users the ability to directly truncate and archive files, users can now see what specific tier of storage a file or directory resides in. This significantly helps users be more efficient by adding further clarity around file retrieval times, and also provides IT staff an automated mechanism to better manage user expectations.
StorNext is not the only Quantum technology that is receiving attention within this context, next month we are also launching important improvements to our ultra-fast F-Series NVME storage arrays. Now more than ever F-Series systems will be easier to deploy and manage thanks to an intuitive GUI that can control a wide-array of storage operations such as health monitoring of multiple system components, creating RAID sets, and configuring storage networks. Furthermore, F-Series now supports Quantum’s Cloud Based Analytics software, so both administrators and Quantum support can remotely monitor F-Series storage for even greater levels of autonomy and uptime.
Both of these latest enhancements should be of tremendous help to IT professionals — a group of individuals often under tremendous pressure to support a growing number of users – as well as the organizations they work for in being able to better manage more complexity across their storage environments.
To learn more about all that StorNext and F-Series can do for your business, visit Quantum.com or contact us directly today.