Posted by 
CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas offers a platform for all the cool new stuff that will be vying for wallet share during the next few years. The show was built to highlight the latest in entertainment, as well as home- and office-based electronic gadgets, but recently the autonomous vehicle section of the show has grown to substantial prominence as reflected in this article from the Guardian.
So what does Quantum have to do with Autonomous Vehicles? It turns out that the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) development industry is generating more data than anyone anticipated. A commonly cited statistic from the Rand Corporation states that an AV car model needs to be driven 275 million error free miles before it can be determined that it is as safe as a human driver.
Source: Rand Corporation
To gain necessary confidence in a design the autonomous vehicle development process begins with equipping test cars and trucks with numerous sensors such as high-resolution video cameras, LIDAR, and RADAR. These technologies enable developers to gather real world data and create algorithms that simulate vehicles driving through locations in a range of conditions to assess how well the car or truck will do on its own (autonomously). This real-world data gathering exercise involves fleets of test vehicles creating 10s and 100s of petabytes of data per year for each of these technology development companies.
Quantum’s strength is a deep heritage in managing video data throughout all processes – from high performance analysis and editing through long term preservation, protection and access of content. Quantum is a perfect fit for autonomous vehicle development.
Over the past several years Quantum has helped leading AV developers deploy storage infrastructures to accommodate all aspects of the developers’ workflows. Through that experience we saw an additional need: find the “best” way to move the TB’s of data gathered daily in test vehicles to the data center. In this case “best” includes key requirements such as “easy”, “fast”, and “affordable”. During CES 2019, Quantum presented and demonstrated a complete workflow – capturing data in the vehicle, moving it to the data center, and managing it throughout its active life.
We set up a functional demonstration of our new mobile storage solution which includes a storage magazine that inserts into a chassis in the vehicle and another in the data center (or garage) to facilitate the easy, fast transfer of in-vehicle created data to the data center. We also continued to present our StorNext end-to-end high-performance platform with integrated data lifecycle management.
In our suite at the MGM Grand, interest in Quantum’s in-vehicle storage solution ran high. We hosted non-stop meetings that included OEMs, tier 1 developers, industry luminaries
and leading-edge technology developers. There was strong interest in both our mobile storage platform as well as our data center-side technology – and a lot of conversations to be continued after the show. This market for storage is hot. Quantum’s solution is a perfect fit. And we got a lot of good input on where the market is heading so we can start developing our next generation of products.