NEVADA CITY, Calif., and CENTENNIAL, Colo.—Telestream DIVA content management platform is now certified for use with the Quantum ActiveScale object storage platform and will be jointly demonstrated in the Quantum booth at the 2026 NAB Show, April 18-22, in Las Vegas.

The certification, which includes use Quantum ActiveScale integrated Cold Storage tier, enables media organizations to combine DIVA’s proven, policy-driven archive workflows with an on-premises object storage platform. Quantum ActiveScale is designed to deliver extreme durability, lower power and cooling costs and streamlined management to support long-term preservation at petabyte scale.

The certification also expands the relationship between the companies, building on existing certification of Quantum StorNext and interoperability with Telestream solutions, such as Vantage.

Media companies are now generating and retaining more content than ever, creating pressure to archive everything safely, affordably and sustainably. As the value of this content grows and libraries expand across sports, broadcast, production and streaming operations, organizations rely on DIVA’s lifecycle and policy management to keep archives structured, searchable and ready for reuse.

But protecting and retaining vast collections for decades also requires storage that is power-efficient, cost-effective, and secure at petabyte scale. With cloud costs rising and long-term content value increasing, organizations are seeking modern, on-premises S3 object storage with predictable economics and sustainable preservation.

The combined Telestream-Quantum solution provides a modern foundation for sports organizations, broadcasters, production companies, post facilities and enterprises managing long-term video libraries. With DIVA now certified across all ActiveScale tiers, users can build archives that:

• Scale from terabytes to multiple petabytes and beyond.
• Maintain consistent DIVA workflows across on-premises and cloud-based S3 tiers.
• Use a unified API-driven archive strategy to simplify ingest, retention, and retrieval.
• Preserve aging or at-risk library assets in a cost-efficient form factor.
• Avoid unpredictable cloud egress fees while retaining cloud-like flexibility.

Telestream has certified all active versions of DIVA with ActiveScale and ActiveScale Cold Storage using Quantum’s S3 API. The certification covers archiving, retrieval, metadata management and policy-driven lifecycle operations across local and hybrid archive environments. Both companies have validated interoperability and offer coordinated support for customers deploying the integrated solution.

Live demonstrations will be conducted at NAB booth N1726.

More information is available on the Telestream and Quantum websites.

Science fiction books and films have predicted it for years, but now it is actually upon us. Artificial Intelligence is here, and it is being used in the television and film industry.

Like any new tool, the desire is to use AI to improve productivity, while maintaining quality. AI also helps us do tasks that would just be impossible for a single individual to do.

Anyone who has attended a few NAB Shows knows that buzzwords and hot technologies rise and fall, and artificial intelligence is currently the hot technology—expect to find references to AI across the show floor.

“It’s an incredible time to be involved with AI and media right now, and the needs can often be both simple and profound,” said Skip Levens, marketing director for media & entertainment at Quantum. “For example, there are a ton of language models that will transcribe audio and tag it in a video timeline. But what about when you have decades of priceless archival film where multiple people are not just talking over each other, but talking in different languages? That turns out to be great example of where standard tools don’t work well.”

Using AI to recognize what sort of material you want and to understand the languages can streamline an otherwise nearly impossible task.

“We have a customer using Quantum’s ActiveScale Cold Storage solution, offering S3-enabled object storage for hot (active) and cold (inactive) data sets, to support the long-term archiving that reduces cold storage costs by up to 60 percent,” Levens said. “This is especially crucial as companies realize the value that today’s data could hold in the future, whether it be a week or decades from now.”

Next Generation
At the NAB Show, ENCO will unveil enCaption Sierra, the company’s next-generation automated closed-captioning solution. Sierra can pair with ENCO’s enTranslate software to offer live translation to more than 37 languages in real-time.

ENCO will also have some flashy AI possibilities in its NAB Show booth.

“This year, we will highlight how broadcasters can utilize ENCO’s Qimera live virtual production and augmented reality solution,” said Ken Frommert, president of ENCO.  “We will also debut an AI-generated virtual anchor within a 3D space. In our booth, we will use AI and virtual production tools to demonstrate a virtual anchor reporting live news.”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be at NAB Show 2024 highlighting each of the company’s six solution areas for media & entertainment operations. Focusing on generative AI, monetization and cloud production, it will use the example of newsroom production as the backdrop of how to apply a number of different solutions.

“Visitors to the AWS booth will also learn how generative AI is being used to enhance viewing experiences for audiences and free up time during production,” said Tracy Geist, global head of media & entertainment for games and sports marketing at AWS. “While AI and machine learning (ML) have already begun to transform broadcast production processes in many ways, our activations at NAB will highlight how the industry is still just scratching the surface of all the day-to-day applications of the technology.”

Geist was eager to give examples of how big customers are using AI to improve both the viewing experience and broadcasters’ production workflows.

“AI is playing a big role in improving the ad-insertion process by making it easier to identify and automate natural ad breaks in content to ensure higher-quality broadcasts,” she said. “Using AI also enables content providers to insert ads that match the context of what’s happening, and more personalized ads based on viewer interests, using tools like Amazon Personalize.”

Geist also said that FOX Sports worked with AWS on its AI-powered Catch Up with Highlights feature, which is powered by Amazon’s open-source Media Replay Engine framework, as well as several AWS services and solutions.

“The engine behind the feature ingests broadcast streams, identifies valuable match moments through AI-trained computer vision, then encodes delivery streams with metadata across user devices,” she said. “By capturing key moments and events as they unfold, Catch Up with Highlights makes it easier for audiences to stay up-to-date with the action, and experience the excitement of the game, regardless of when they start watching.”

Natural Language Companion
At the NAB Show, Nice People At Work (NPAW) will present its newly enhanced version of NaLa, an AI-powered, natural-language companion app that helps video services work with data and the NPAW Suite.

“Our platform provides so much data and so many options for working with it that it can be overwhelming for our smaller and newer customers,” said Till Sudworth, head of the video business unit and member of the management board at NPAW. “At the same time, we wanted to enable even the most seasoned NPAW users to derive faster insights. By streamlining the process of identifying the root causes of errors, we are empowering all our customers with the ability to resolve issues more quickly and cost-effectively.”

Recently updated, NaLa 2.0 is integrated into the NPAW Suite of apps to help streaming operators obtain actionable insights into areas like service performance, viewer-perceived quality, and user behavior. Users can use either voice or text to ask NaLa questions about, for instance, their service’s performance and user engagement, and quickly receive answers in both text and graph formats. NaLa can handle these requests in almost every language in the world.

“Users can also click on a graph to gather in-depth analyses in seconds, revealing hidden trends, anomalies, and key learnings,” Sudworth said. “Additionally, users can request NaLa to create custom dashboards tailored to their specific needs or ask for guidance on how to use the platform.”

AI and its derivatives shows great promise, and the next few years will go a long way in embedding these technologies in our work and private lives. Most of us already have a version of AI in our homes and pockets—think “Alexa” and “Siri”—and AI is already toiling away behind the scene in many industries, including the media & entertainment industry.

The promise is that AI will lead to better, faster and more-targeted information and entertainment. Will the promise live up to the actual implementation?

Ask me in 2030.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry isn’t new. Recently, however, it’s increasingly being deployed on an unprecedented scale and for previously inconceivable functions. For example, Marvel recently employed AI to create the impactful opening credits to its new Secret Invasion series. Meanwhile, CGI teams working on the Indiana Jones: The Dial of Destiny film used AI to turn back the clock on Harrison Ford’s appearance.

Though it’s worth keeping in mind that the technology isn’t without controversary— taking the recent SAG AFTRA and WGA strikes as an infamous example—there is, however, little doubt that recent AI breakthroughs are helping to democratize the use of AI across the M&E sector. 

A move that is making it possible for big production companies as well as small independents, film studios, and TV stations to meet the growing demand for content. Armed with AI, these firms are unlocking new levels of creativity that previously would have taken a significant amount of time, effort, and money to achieve.

AI: A Transformative Tool
Today’s AI technologies present an enormous opportunity for M&E companies to improve their operations, engage audiences in new ways, and simplify their content and distribution processes.

For example, production crews can now use AI-powered analytics to automate previously labour-intensive manual processes. Using features like language translation and speech-to-text, they can now tackle tasks like adding subtitles or dubbing with ease and ensure these are appropriately synchronized within video frames—all of which improves output quality while making production budgets stretch much, much further. 

Similarly, AI can be used to tag, enrich, and transcribe huge quantities of content—including raw unstructured data—something that makes video libraries and archives much more searchable and discoverable. With AI, crew members are able to easily search existing content using attributes such as people, places, things, and even sentiment. By adding metadata to video and image files, M&E teams can potentially save hours of time and effort when tailoring content for specific audiences. 

It’s also much faster and easier to generate new content, and additional monetisation opportunities, from existing libraries. For instance, rather than having to search through decades of film footage to locate clips featuring a particular actor, now all it takes is a single mouse click to precisely identify and retrieve each appearance incidence.

In terms of enabling enhanced efficiencies, AI-driven animations and character modelling are helping to streamline the creative process. Meanwhile, in addition to enabling filmmakers to go from concept to camera in minutes, AI is being used to support the creation of highly optimized production schedules and enhance creative decision-making. 

In a world where post-production and editing activities are increasingly being undertaken by teams working collaboratively in the cloud, cutting edge generative AI tools are helping to make the media production and transmission process itself a faster and more integrated procedure. It’s also making processes like the restoration of library and archived content and its transformation into new broadcast standards like 4K a much more economical proposition.

Finally, generative AI technologies like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are helping to revolutionize the creation and analysis of scripts and storylines. That includes the procedural content, player prompts and dialogue that is utilized when developing new video games. With the right generative AI tools, these fundaments can be created in a fraction of the time and different creative options explored and refined faster and at a much lower cost.

Harnessing all these new capabilities, however, depends on having cutting edge integrated storage environments that are designed to support these new and highly agile AI-powered ways of working.

Putting AI to Work in Storage
The growing pre-eminence of AI is closely aligned with the availability of new high speed and high performance storage solutions that makes it possible for today’s content producers to organize, manage, and share digital content and images faster and make the most of their data assets.

Unlocking productivity, efficiency, and new ways of working, enriching data with AI-enabled storage systems not only lends speed and parallel processing capabilities to production workflows. It also speeds up rendering and video and image processing and makes it possible to add metadata to video and image files. This potentially saves hours of work thanks to content tagging and automated object recognition while accelerating content movement and archiving activities.

Enabling teams in any size of organization to get up and running with new AI applications faster, these high availability solutions make it possible to set up and manage multiple production workflows simultaneously and offer automated content management features that can be customized in real-time.

Releasing Creatives to ‘Do Their Thing’
Enriching data with AI-enabled storage systems enables creative teams to deliver complete productions in significantly compressed time frames and at a much lower cost. This can be anything from integrating automatic text, images, and video generation to enable enhanced experimentation and collaboration between creative teams, to analyzing and enriching the content used in broadcast, post-production, sport, and other media workflows.

By helping creative groups everywhere take advantage of transformative AI capabilities, today’s all-in-one content management and storage solutions are helping to accelerate the delivery of new and compelling content faster—and much more efficiently.

Retrieving important value from content libraries is a huge problem that Media & Entertainment (M&E) companies are facing today. Through the help of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), these companies can share their content and extract value in the form of workflow efficiencies, better content creation and even additional revenue. ML is allowing companies to access metadata associated with every frame of video, making their content searchable and meaningful. Whether applying ML in real life or less time sensitive workflow ML makes vast amounts of video searchable in an instant.

In this whitepaper, you will read about:

• What machine learning is capable of and why it matters to extracting valuable data 
• Recognizing the power of ML and AI on these company's databases
• How to get started and what to expect with these tools
• Read the white paper now!

The White Paper is available for download here. 

SAN FRANCISCO—It’s a technology that continues to prove its worth and defy its detractors, boasting of speed and touting reliability as a high-capacity storage vault, a means of disaster recovery and a way to share content. 

And now, as archiving in the cloud continues to mature, the technology continues to win over large broadcasters and small production houses alike. It has proven to be secure, the capacity to handle massive amounts of data, and support for collaboration between geographic locales separated by continents. 

The next steps: Driving long-term value, improving search functions, meeting the needs of different types of customers and addressing thorny issues like cost of egress and long-term adaptability.

Not Just a Simple Migration
“People have become much more comfortable with the reliability, security and affordability of the cloud for content archives,” said Geoff Stedman, chief marketing officer of SDVI. “But what people are also realizing is that simply lifting and shifting an archive to the cloud is not [always] the right approach.”

While the explosion of SVOD, AVOD and FAST channels offers new opportunities to monetize content, that scenario only works if the content can be found, accessed and transported through a media supply chain and then prepared for a distribution partner, Stedman said. “[Migration to a cloud archive] presents an opportunity to standardize and normalize content file formats, clean up and enrich metadata and create an archive of golden masters that can be monetized across many different distribution outlets.”

In addition, it’s not just important how you migrate your content into the cloud, but rather if you have visibility into cloud—and the ability easily retrieve it. 

“An organization’s cloud environment can be a bit nebulous,” said Brett Beers, vice president of technology for TMT Insights, a professional services and software development company. “I predict there will need to be more of a focus on investing in productivity and operational tools that will widen the net in terms of the user type that can both interact and manage cloud technology.” 

Plus, customers moving their archives to the cloud are not just looking to migrate a tape library; they are looking to derive more long-term value from their assets by applying meaningful metadata during the ingest process, said Evan Statton, senior principal architect of M&E for Amazon Web Services. 

“When cloud archiving first came on the scene, simply moving massive amounts of content to and across clouds was the clear challenge,” said Jon Finegold, chief marketing officer for Signiant. “The tools provided by those early cloud systems simply weren’t cut out for massive media archives.”

Today’s software can now effectively move petabytes of content into and out of cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and Wasabi.

Migration Trends 
Across the content creation marketplace, there is new, significant interest for companies of varying sizes to consider migration to the cloud. For some, a lift-and-shift approach might be the right step, particularly for an organization new to the technology. For others, designing a digital supply chain from scratch is a more valuable approach. 

“Regardless of the path you pick, the first step is visibility,” said Beers. “What do you have, and then the next step is action: what am I going to do with it?”

TMT Insights faced such a scenario when working with a post house in Burbank, Calif., that was moving from a fully on-premise operation to a 100% cloud-native digital supply chain. “For this engagement, they were able to decrease the time to market and enable rapid innovation by not having the challenges that come with having reliance or integration [with] their legacy systems,” Beers said.

The next challenge: How to help customers easily find and access content archived in the cloud. Several companies, including Signiant, have solutions that automatically index assets and create preview files so customers can perform simple searches across their archives—whether those be on-prem or cloud—without having to move the assets. “Archives need to be actionable,” Finegold said about the company’s Media Engine software. “Accessing them must be quick, easy and cost-effective. When asked for a clip, users need to be able to search, preview and send those assets anywhere, fast.”

TMT Insights also sees increased demand for this type of functionality. The company’s Polaris operational management platform allows users to manage their end-to-end cloud-based media supply chains via a file manager module within Polaris. That module enables enhanced visibility and gives users controls to manage their ingest and prequalification workflows. By providing users access to the cloud in a purposeful way, one of TMT Insight’s clients was able to increase their on-time delivery from an average of 65 percent to 99 percent, Beers said.

Mining Your Value
Another key trend in the cloud movement: Ensuring customers derive additional long-term value from their assets by applying meaningful metadata during ingest. AWS helped Formula One (F1) achieve this using the AWS Media2Cloud solution when it migrated more than 4 petabytes of archived video content to Amazon S3 and now uses artificial intelligence/machine learning services to reduce the time it takes to catalog content. 

“Additionally, we’ve learned from our customers that ‘one size does not fit all’ for archive retrieval patterns,” Statton said, referring to the Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class and Flexible Retrieval storage class, which are designed to help customers fine-tune retrieval performance based on the needs of archive usage.

The cloud is proving attractive to organizations of all sizes. Giving small creative groups the ability to easily access the cloud was the impetus behind a new release from Quantum that integrates a media asset management module and shared storage software. The goal was to remove the complexity that can often hamper a smaller creative group when it comes to configuring separate devices and setting up separate production workflows.

Quantum’s H4000 Essential provides a standard set of features—automatic context indexing, shared storage—but doesn’t require specialized IT skills to support. That was the case for the creative agency Switch, which works on multiple projects simultaneously via the StorNext collaborative shared storage system and the Quantum cloud-based analytics software. 

The benefit: A small creative company can quickly deploy production-ready shared storage in the cloud, allowing for collaborative, remote video editing in the cloud.

SDVI is seeing this as well, as companies of all sizes realize they can become more efficient and agile when they take advantage of cloud technologies, Stedman said. “Moving their archives and media processing to the cloud, even at a relatively smaller scale, frees them up to focus on their core creative business because they no longer have to spend time procuring, deploying and managing on-premise infrastructure.” 

AWS is seeing demand from all types of customers, from TV stations to larger broadcasters looking to migrate hundreds of linear channels to AWS. The company was recently awarded an Engineering Excellence Award from the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) for its “Color in the Cloud” cloud-based remote service that enables customers of all sizes to perform high-fidelity color grading in
the cloud.

Egress Costs
Challenges remain, however. While the cloud has proven its mettle at handling shared content with speed and reliability, there are instances where a cloud gateway linked to a high-capacity storage infrastructure may be a better fit. As veteran media and entertainment tech companies have long known, storage on LTO data tape can be lower in cost per terabyte than primary disk storage.

And in some instances, the best archiving solution is a combination of the old and the new. Software from companies like XenData can be used to create a hybrid archive that links together on-premise storage with the cloud so that file-based applications can write to and read from cloud storage. Using a XenData S3 Server interface with a XenData LTO archive creates a private cloud storage solution allows an organization to keep the attractive aspects of LTO storage onsite. In this scenario, files can be remotely downloaded free of any egress charges.

And that’s another lingering issue for archiving in the cloud to address: The cost
of egress. 

Though the industry is moving in that direction, workflows requiring heavy visual effects and editing work are still not fully realized within the cloud to run at scale. So files sometimes must be pulled down and worked on outside of the cloud, with a heavy price tag to boot.

Understanding those types of cloud economics continues to be a key challenge for customers when it comes to archiving in the cloud. “Customers are capturing so much more content and want to preserve all of it,” Finegold said. “But for how long? How much content will be retrieved? When will it impact things like egress costs? These and other questions make predicting costs a real challenge.”

Others say the cost of egress is generally not an issue for content companies moving their archives to the cloud since content deals can be struck between content owners and cloud-based streaming services that are fulfilled without content ever leaving the cloud—with a majority of local, on-premise editing accomplished using proxy files that are a fraction the size of the original master in the cloud. 

The most important priorities in an archiving system will be familiar to anyone navigating the modern content creation space: Agility. Adaptability. Visibility. Ideally, as Beers from TMT Insights put it, “Our goal is to make the shift to the cloud less intimidating, to show clients the way and give them the tools they need to navigate that path themselves.” 

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Quantum Corporation has rolled out the Quantum® Collaborative Workflow Solution powered by CatDVTM. 

The turnkey solution was designed specifically for Adobe Premiere Pro users and to help large creative teams address the challenges of remote workflow editing and collaboration. 

Quantum said the launch occurred after extensive testing to ensure that Adobe Premiere Pro customers receive a completely integrated, Quantum-tested and supported solution.

“Quantum is proud to incorporate a high level of integration with Adobe tools so that creative teams can stay productive in their workflow, yet still have a seamless, powerful interface to all of the capabilities of Quantum CatDV,” said Dave Clack, general manager, Cloud Software and Analytics, Quantum. “This new solution incorporates the latest workflow best practices for a ready-to-use StorNext and CatDV environment that makes it easier for Adobe Creative Cloud users to love,” 

"Collaborative teams who rely on Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, or Photoshop, need a platform that gives them the performance and flexibility to realize their vision," said Sue Skidmore, head of partner relations for Adobe Video. “Our users value the tight integration and flexibility of environments provided by Quantum CatDV and StorNext.” 

The offering includes:

• A complete, high-performance StorNext 7 collaborative shared environment tuned for both on-site and remote team members for maximum productivity.
• Installation and integration of the CatDV Panel for Adobe Creative Cloud, including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop, giving creative users access to their entire content and project asset library directly within the Adobe workflow tool of choice.
• Installation and tuning of a complete installation of CatDV Server and Worker Nodes powering automation workflows for file ingest, proxy creation, and content push and pull from shared storage to archive.
• CatDV archive plugin installation and configuration, and customer’s option of library archive storage of up to 240 TB of Quantum Scalar Tape, ActiveScale, or Cloud.
• Optional remote workstation integration for Teradici or similar services.
• All support and training included for a turnkey, ready-to-work solution.

 More information about the solution can be found here.  

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Quantum Corporation announced that EFD Digital, a new division of EFD International, has deployed an end-to-end Quantum software platform as the technology infrastructure that supports its post-production services and the management of video. 

The software-defined storage solution is delivered as a subscription and based on Quantum's StorNext software.

EFD Digital chose the solution to enable its team of geographically dispersed creative professionals to collaborate on and quickly deliver content to a growing client base.

“When we thought about launching EFD Digital, we knew we’d need a solution that would allow our creative professionals to simultaneously access and edit the large files so they can deliver finished content, while we also knew the solution had to be reliable without requiring lots of technical support,” said Roy Santoyo, director of post-production at EFD Digital. “Quantum and StorNext were the obvious choice; the Quantum solution gives us the performance and sharing capabilities you'd find in a large production studio, as well the ability to grow our business without needing to replace our storage platform in the future.”

The Quantum deployment enabled EFD Digital to avoid a patchwork technology approach by providing an all-in-one solution that allows the studio to efficiently choreograph the management of large video files and allows the company to deliver multiple projects to many clients, quickly, Quantum reported. 

The current studio deployment is 1 PB of storage and is expected to scale to 3 PB within a year. With the StorNext software subscription, they now have the ability to scale to potentially unlimited content growth. “In addition to more TV series, we’re already seeing growing demand for advertising and film projects,” says Santoyo. “Our business is changing and growing quickly. But with Quantum, we are ready.”

HACKETTSTOWN, N.J.—Vislink is launching the Quantum IP-native wireless camera receiver, which incorporates IP connectivity to provide reliable reception from wireless camera transmitters and more efficient workflows, the company says.

Quantum is an IP-native, high-performance RF receiver that enables production teams to implement remote production systems. It delivers content directly over IP fiber networks and cuts out additional video compressions stages, allowing for the removal of additional equipment CAPEX costs and increase video quality, per Vislink.

The Quantum receiver can provide built-in SRT capability to contribute video over the unmanaged internet. It also extends the number of RF inputs on a wireless camera receiver to 16, which enables wider area of coverage and RF coverage through MRC and Packet switching technology.

The unit also features a touchscreen interface and APIs for integration into system control and orchestration tools. There is also low latency video processing technology for multiformat video decoding that supports all major video formats. It’s also a SMPTE 2110-ready device.

Vislink built Quantum to work on both remote production and on-site live event coverage, said Mickey Miller, CEO of Vislink.

“By putting IP connectivity at the heart of the Quantum receiver, Vislink can help content creators fully modernize their networks to deliver high-impact wireless camera images and simplify the infrastructure required to bring that content home,” Miller said.

For more information, visit www.vislink.com.  

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Quantum has launched its H2000 Series hybrid storage array, which leverages SSD and HDD media to enable users to align performance and cost with their applications and provides tight integration with the company’s StorNext File System to enhance productivity.

“The volume of unstructured data that organizations are creating can impede their ability to make use of their data efficiently,” said Noemi Greyzdorf, director of Product Marketing at Quantum. 

Calling the H2000 Series a “generational upgrade,” Greyzdorf said the storage array provides better storage capacity and access.

Providing the foundation for future scalable deployments in StorNext environments, the H2000 Series offers maximum throughput and sequential I/O performance for accelerated media production workflows, the company said.

The H2000 Series can be configured with high-performance SSD storage or high-capacity HDD storage, and with either fiber channel or Ethernet connectivity to meet the needs of any environment, it said.

It’s based on the same software-defined architecture used in Quantum’s F-Series line of NVMe storage servers, and both the F-Series and the H2000 Series can be deployed as part of a StorNext file system cluster, Quantum said. 

In November 2020, the company unveiled a strategy of offering solutions on a subscription basis to support unstructured data across its lifecycle. 

“We made a big commitment to our customers when we introduced the software subscription license based on capacity last year,” said Ed Fiore, vice president/general manager, Primary Storage at Quantum. 

“Since then, we’ve focused on new developments that address their needs for expanded capacities, real-time search and analytics and other functionalities,” he said. “By introducing the H2000 Series, we can help our customers deliver and extract the full value of these software-based propositions, empowering their future workflows and performance needs.”

More information is available on the Quantum website. 

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Quantum has announced its acquisition of Square Box Systems, which specializes in data cataloging, user collaboration and digital asset management software. Quantum says that the acquisition will expand its portfolio of tech for classifying, managing and protecting data across its lifecycle.

Square Box Systems, which is based in the U.K., is the maker of CatDV, a media management and workflow automation software platform designed to help media and metadata organize, communicate and collaborate. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to do this.

According to Quantum, many customers use the CatDV platform with Quantum StorNext, including in the post-production, sports, government and education markets. Quantum says it plans to combine the CatDV software with StorNext to provide an all-in-one workgroup appliance.

As part of the acquisition Square Box Systems founder and CTO Rolf Howarth and CEO Dave Clack are joining the Quantum team. Howarth is now a principal architect with Quantum and Clack is the general manager, Cloud Software and Analytics.

"There is huge untapped value contained in video, digital images and other valuable file data," says Jamie Lerner , president and CEO at Quantum. "This acquisition will not only help our customers make better business decisions based on their data, but it represents another key step in Quantum's transformation by adding data enrichment technology to our portfolio."

BOULDER, Colo.—Quantum Corporation is joining the ranks of the Active Archive Alliance, joining other storage and IT vendors that collaborate on elevating new active archive strategies, technologies and use cases.

The Active Archive Alliance collaborates on providing end-users with technical expertise to design and implement modern solutions to manage large, unstructured data growth. Active archives are designed to manage data for rapid search, retrieval and analytics, using a data management layer to enable online access to data throughout its lifecycle.

“We are pleased to welcome Quantum to the Active Archive Alliance,” said Peter Faulhaber, chairman of Active Archive Alliance and president and CEO of Fujifilm Recording Media USA. “The fast pace of data growth is spurring increased interest in active archive solutions as a way to cost-effectively manage digital archives while maintaining fast access to data. Quantum brings a legacy of active archive solutions that enrich the Alliance membership’s range of innovative active archive solutions for intelligent data management.”

A recent example of Quantum’s efforts in this area was its acquisition of ActiveScale object storage, which Director of Product Management at Quantum, Mark Pastor, says when combined with Quantum’s tape platforms elevates the company’s participation in the archive community.

For more information, visit www.activearchive.com.  

The concept of working remotely from our home studios is now generally accepted and integrated into our everyday lives. However, for the media and entertainment (M&E) industry, the transition to remote workflows has presented significant challenges from multiple angles, and had companies scrambling to find new ways to resume production as quickly as possible.   

New and more efficient methods have evolved to help production continue. Essentially, this period has served as a catalyst for the evolution of remote production, which is now the “new normal.”

Remote production enables collaboration for geo-dispersed teams—colorists in Melbourne, VFX in London, editors in Los Angeles and others scattered globally—to contribute their artistry to complete the final product. 

WORKFLOWS BEFORE REMOTE PRODUCTION

Creative teams and workflows have traditionally been in-house, working side-by-side in the same building over the same network and accessing content on local systems. 

The storage infrastructure supporting these video workflows generally included a mix of disk, tape, object and cloud. The network infrastructures were generally slow but sufficient for on-prem access.

CHALLENGES WITH PAST METHODS

As production has shifted to remote offices, new challenges have arisen. Accessing and sharing large video files in distant repositories, including 4K and high-resolution content, have become crucial to the collaborative workflow. 

Slower networks cause latencies and some file systems don’t support storage choices that optimize workflows, including fast NVMe for performance-driven projects and cost-effective tape, object and cloud for “cooler” content that doesn’t need to be accessed as frequently. Companies need a fast, centralized storage ecosystem to make it easy to find and share video content remotely.

Tip: Try RDMA networking for direct access to NVMe storage for reduced latencies and lower infrastructure costs. 

DRIVERS FOR REMOTE PRODUCTION

There are many reasons for the rise of remote video production—primarily the increasing number of people now working from home. Today’s trend for repurposing previously created content, with creative work conducted remotely is another reason.   

Additionally, the temporary shuttering of theaters has catapulted demand for streaming video content and accelerated the adoption of remote production to fulfill this market need. 

Each scenario requires geographically distributed teams who rely on remote sharing and collaborative workflows and are dependent on technologies to support them.  

OPTIONS FOR REMOTE PRODUCTION

Today, organizations are adapting their workflows to meet rapidly increasing demands for remote video content production. New methods provide content access and sharing to maintain business continuity and monetize the final product. Available options for remote production workflows include: 

• Move to the cloud—While the cloud has its benefits, there are also other important factors to consider. Egress fees can add up quickly for retrieving large video files and moving content to and from the cloud can be prohibitively slow. Hybrid- and multicloud infrastructures can be more practical alternatives. 
• Adjust workflows—This approach generally involves moving content and workflows around, which can be disruptive, potentially delay projects and risk content security. Additionally, transporting video content on shuttle drives between the studio and creative teams is neither efficient nor secure.   
• Use existing infrastructure—Fast and generally simple to deploy, remote desktop technology provides access to the shared storage infrastructure. It requires minimal or no changes to the workflow, enables production continuity and reduces downtime. Virtual desktop technology gives organizations remote access to their existing file system and storage tiers, avoiding investments in all-new infrastructures. 

Tip: Tiered storage architectures optimize resource utilization and facilitate remote access.  

REMOTE PRODUCTION TODAY

Without new films or events to monetize, creative teams need to access, update and redistribute archived content. Entertainment companies are adjusting by moving the application to where the content is instead of moving huge amounts of video data around. In response, technologies offer remote production and editing capabilities with secure, virtual workspaces to handle graphics-intensive applications.  

Remote desktop technology has been widely adopted for dispersed teams to seamlessly maintain creative workflows with access to their workstations and applications from their home studios. This is especially valuable when moving everything to the cloud isn’t feasible.

In video production, accessing and sharing content is critical. To help make this magic happen, the storage infrastructure is a key component in the workflow. With remote desktop technologies, organizations can use their existing storage ecosystem to streamline remote video workflows without interrupting the storage infrastructure.

Tip: Virtual desktop technology leverages the existing file storage system for ongoing remote access to large video files.

ADVANTAGES OF VIRTUAL DESKTOPS FOR REMOTE PRODUCTION

Remote teams require quick access to content, fast network speeds and reduced latencies to handle high-resolution video files. They need technologies that facilitate remote content sharing, enhance the collaborative process and minimize interruptions.

Ideally, they should use a file system with the fastest streaming performance, connectivity options and massive scalability. Storage tiering can also improve performance, like using object storage for a cost-effective storage pool that’s highly searchable and accessible. 

Virtual desktop technologies provide flexibility to access video content from virtually anywhere. These workflows don’t impact the content storage infrastructure and provide file system access as local, which is especially beneficial for large files and streams like video.   

It’s easy to see why virtual desktop technologies are widely used—they provide remote users with the same experience of their studio workstation at home. 

THE NEW NORM OF REMOTE PRODUCTION

Handling large volumes of content remotely has presented challenges to media organizations. They’ve had to rapidly modify workflows, with remote production being a top priority for many. Remote creatives have needed to be able to access, share and deliver video content to maintain operational continuance.

There are different methods to continue production operations and choosing the right approach depends on each company’s objectives. Each method offers benefits with some having more costs and infrastructure changes associated with them. Sometimes the simplest alternative, which changes as little as possible, can be the best solution for highly productive remote workflows.  

Tip: Work with a vendor expert in video and video-like data to understand what changes in your remote production workflows will be the most advantageous for your specific objectives. 

Jessica Iler is the product marketing manager/StorNext for Quantum.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Quantum has unveiled StorNext 6.4 software with support for self-describing objects to make cloud content more easily accessible, thereby enabling new hybrid-cloud workflows.  

The new version allows clients to write files into the StorNext file system and then, based on policy, the file system copies files to public or private cloud storage and offers the option of including additional object metadata. Doing so enables non-StorNext software clients and cloud processes to access objects directly by leveraging the new extended metadata, the company said.

"Quantum's StorNext file system has been widely adopted by the media and entertainment industry because of the way it maximizes performance for flash-based drives, high-resolution workflows and multiple workstreams," said Tom Coughlin, president, Coughlin Associates. "By making hybrid and multicloud storage environments more accessible, the StorNext file system continues to evolve as a tool for enabling media and entertainment workflows."

StorNext 6.4 also offers improved retrieval speed from large object stores, the company said. Users can expect to see a 5x to 7x performance increase depending on the size of their objects and other factors.

Other StorNext 6.4 features include StorNext Dynamic Library Pooling, which improves resiliency of large tape archives, enabling multiple libraries to be used for performance and redundancy enhancements, and AWS Glacier archive service support.

“This latest version of StorNext software adds new ways to archive content and access it in the cloud and is another step toward providing a seamless bridge between on-premise and the cloud," said Ed Fiore, vice president and general manager, Primary Storage at Quantum.

More information is available online. 

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Quantum has introduced the F1000, a new, lower-priced addition to its F-Series line of NVMe storage appliances.

Quantum’s F-Series was designed specifically for the video and image-based workloads, whether it’s HD video used for movie, TV and sports production, marketing and advertising content, or image-based workloads that require high speed processing, such as the data from a satellite feed, a drone, a car used in the development of new automated driver assistance systems (ADAS) and more.

Quantum’s customers can deploy the F-Series NVMe systems as part of the company’s StorNext scale-out file storage cluster and leverage the StorNext data management capabilities to move data between NVMe storage pools and other storage pools.

The F1000 is a 1U NVMe storage server optimized for performance, without the high-availability design of the F2000. Using a single-controller server and optimizing the F-Series software stack to run with less CPU, the F1000 offers the same streaming performance and response times as the F2000 at a lower entry price, the company said. The Quantum F1000 offers performance that is 5x to 10x faster than an equivalent SAS SSD storage array, at a similar price, according to Quantum.

The F1000 is available in two capacity points: 39 TB and 77 TB. It offers the same connectivity options as the F2000: 32 Gb fiber channel or iSER / RDMA using 100 Gb Ethernet, and is designed to be deployed as part of a StorNext scale out file storage cluster.

The F1000 leverages the same software-defined block storage platform that was introduced with the Quantum F2000.

In today’s fast-paced, always-on world of sports and news media production, the ability to quickly edit and produce compelling content from multiple sources in real time is critical.

Although many factors come into play, an organization’s underlying storage architecture has a big impact on whether this can be achieved. It plays a central role in enabling production staff to work as efficiently as possible on vast amounts of visual content—and ultimately get their story out before the competition.

This is where “hyperconvergence” can help. Hyperconverged storage is a relatively new technical innovation that brings compute, storage and networking together in a single box, and is showing significant promise to help media businesses reach the high levels of performance they require.

With everything in one place, media companies can streamline their IT operations and gain a significant amount of agility, enabling them to deploy storage resources when needed to support their particular workflow. This type of architecture also enables media organizations to more intelligently scale expensive storage resources by giving them greater control over how they add performance or capacity to their storage foundation.

But this is just scratching the surface. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that hyperconverged storage has the potential to transform the way media businesses manage and deliver their content.

NEXT-LEVEL EFFICIENCY

If we look back over the last 10 years or so, the one thing that has characterized the development of the media industry is speed. Content in ever-growing file sizes now has to be delivered faster than ever before to satisfy consumer demand and capture the attention of viewers—often on an international scale.

This requires media businesses to take their efficiency to the next level and deploying hyperconvergence is proving to be an effective way to achieve this. This is especially true in small and medium-sized postproduction facilities around the world today, which typically only have one or two IT staff managing all the technical infrastructure.

With such small teams, these IT personnel need to be as operationally efficient as possible. Hyperconverged storage simplifies operations in a way that enables them to work much more effectively. For example, with compute, storage and networking all in one place, IT staff get a single-pane-of-glass view into the system’s performance. This makes it much easier to manage and monitor the entire architecture.

In addition, hyperconvergence ultimately means they have fewer assets to manage because multiple systems come in one box. There are fewer things that can go wrong, fewer things that can be broken and deployment is much quicker since only one box has to be deployed instead of two or three.

The need for fewer networking cables simplifies the connectivity process and enables faster deployment and scaling of hardware resources, while accelerated performance is achieved by removing a layer of external networking between the storage media and the client—thereby giving businesses the tools to do more with less.

From a storage administrator’s perspective, the operational efficiency benefits provided by hyperconverged storage are compelling—putting media organizations in the best position to produce engaging content faster than the competition.

INTERSECTION OF CREATIVITY AND VALUE

Another key consideration is, of course, cost. Whether you’re a post-production house, broadcaster, or sports video producer, modern media organizations are constantly under pressure to deliver more content to viewers for the same or similar prices.

They’re expected to increase content production, while revenue streams essentially stay the same. This presents challenges as costs from the creative side of the business increase and additional storage infrastructure is required to store all this content.

This all places a growing emphasis on becoming as cost efficient as possible—an area where hyperconverged storage shines due to the fact that it condenses storage infrastructure into a smaller datacenter footprint. Not only does this save power and cooling costs, it also reduces hardware costs by combining server nodes, controllers and media onto one chassis instead of requiring separate units.

From a total-cost-of-ownership perspective, hyperconvergence provides significant value. For example, less networking is required as there’s no need for an external network to connect the storage controller to the block storage array—everything is held within one box. What’s more, hyperconverged storage needs fewer processors, which reduces the need for power and delivers even greater cost efficiency for businesses.

Even better news for the media industry is that the benefits of hyperconverged storage are available to everyone—from local TV networks or stations, to the IT departments in medium and large post-production houses. The majority of hyperconverged deployments are NAS-based, which provides a simplified storage infrastructure that meets the performance requirements of postproduction and sports video and supports the industry trend of going all-IP.

This provides greater agility to business operations and offers smaller organizations an entry-level enterprise storage solution that yields cost savings without degrading performance. If that—combined with the operational efficiencies and cost savings on offer—doesn’t convince you of the huge potential of hyperconverged storage for the media industry, nothing will.

Jason Coari isdirector of product marketing atQuantum.

AMSTERDAM—Quantum is featuring the latest developments in its StorNext file system, F-Series NVMe storage arrays for video editing and rendering and R-Series removable, ruggedized storage systems for remote and mobile video during the ongoing IBC 2019 convention at the RAI Amsterdam.

The company is also making its executives available to discuss Quantum’s new line of Distributed Cloud Services and Cloud-Based Analytics Software, which allows users or Quantum’s own support team to manage and monitor environments around the world from one location.

“As the media industry produces more high-resolution, high frame-rate content, significant demands are being placed on the underlying storage infrastructure supporting these workflows,” said Quantum President and CEO Jamie Lerner.

“At IBC, visitors will see a more product- and technology-focused Quantum building on our leadership in both high-speed processing and long-term archiving of video and image content.”

Making its European debut is the Quantum F-Series ultra-fast, highly available NVMe storage array, which uses NVMe flash drives for reads and writes up to five times faster than traditional flash storage and networking systems. This performance supports the demands of real-time editing and rendering of 4K and 8K video, the company said.

The latest versions of the StorNext file system and appliances feature redesigned appliance hardware with two-times faster performance and other benefits, including editing and coloring of 8K content in real time, new predictive data movement and analytics capabilities, new cloud integration approaches and a simpler user experience, the company said.

More information is available on the Quantum website.

See Quantum at IBC 2019 stand 7.B07

HDD technology has long dominated because of good performance, relatively high capacity, and low cost per TB with flash. As price differences between HDDs and SSDs decreased, the desire for higher capacity flash SSDs has become worth the discrepancy – especially as the TCO can sometimes be lower because of density and power.

That’s where NVMe, Non-Volatile Memory express, comes into play. Designed to unlock the performance of all types of non-volatile memory, from flash SSDs to the latest persistent memory technology, this primer will describe how NVMe enables greater performance in both standalone and networked implementations, and some of the key use cases that can benefit from this speed.

Download the full White Paper

EMERYVILLE, CALIF., April 18, 2019 – Advanced Systems Group (ASG), a leading media technology and engineering firm, was named North America Media and Entertainment Partner of the Year by Quantum Corporation last week at the 2019 NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nev. The award recognizes sales achievements for Quantum’s worldwide reseller partners in FY2019.

“Our partners see the value of our offerings and are getting excited about selling the new solutions that we’re highlighting at NAB 2019,” said Brandon Cass, Americas channel director, Quantum. “I am thrilled to see the growth and momentum of the Quantum channel both at the Americas and global level. The channel has been a critical part of Quantum’s success and continues to drive our business every day.”

“We appreciate the recognition from Quantum, and we also appreciate their continued commitment to delivering outstanding storage products for our clients,” said Dave Van Hoy, president of ASG. “At NAB, they showcased a major upgrade of their StorNext high-performance shared storage and a new all-flash NVMe storage platform. These types of innovations help us continue to provide tailored storage solutions for a variety of vertical markets.”

About ASG:
Based in Northern California with offices in the New York Metro Area, Los Angeles, Pacific Northwest, Houston, and the Rocky Mountain Region, Advanced Systems Group LLC of Emeryville, Calif., has provided engineering, systems, integration, support, and training to the multimedia creative and corporate video markets since 1997. With unmatched experience in high-speed shared storage, media asset management, archiving, editing, color and VFX systems, ASG has become one of the largest installers of post-production and shared storage systems in North America. Highly focused on customer success, the ASG team has installed and supported more than 500 storage networks, along with production and post-production systems. As part of its complete solution approach, ASG also offers a range of managed services, providing expert staffing for media production and IT services on a temporary or ongoing basis. For more information, visit www.asgllc.com or call 510-654-8300.

Quantum has launched the F-Series, a new line of NVMe storage arrays “designed for performance, availability and reliability.”

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) flash drives allow for massive parallel processing, while the latest Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking technology provides direct access between workstations and the NVMe storage devices.

[Webinar: Improving Post-Production By Better Utilization Of NVMe Enhanced Storage Resources]

These hardware features are combined with the new Quantum Cloud Storage Platform and the StorNext file system, resulting in powerful end-to-end storage capabilities for post production houses, broadcasters and other rich media environments.

The F2000 is a 2U, dual node server with two hot-swappable compute canisters and up to 24 dual-ported NVMe drives. Each compute canister can access all 24 NVMe drives.

Quantum’s Cloud Storage Platform is integrated with StorNext, allowing customers to reduce total cost of ownership in areas including post production, sport video and rendering/simulation.

Quantum F-Series will enable customers to:

• Ingest, edit and finish content with lightning fast performance – the F-Series is up to five times faster than traditional flash storage/networking, delivering extremely low-latency and hundreds of thousands of IOPs per chassis
• Gain predictable, low-latency access via fibre channel or ethernet – users can reduce infrastructure costs by moving from fibre channel to ethernet IP-based infrastructures
• Meet performance requirements with less rack space – customers who use a large number of HDDs or SSDs to meet their performance requirements can gain back racks of data centre space

Jamie Lerner, Quantum president and CEO, said: “This is the most significant product launch we’ve done in years, not only because our F-Series product line will enable our customers in media to produce more great hi-def content faster over IP networks, but because the F-Series is the first product line based on the Quantum Cloud Storage Platform.

“This platform is a stepping stone for us, and for our customers, to move to a more software-defined, hyperconverged architecture, and is at the core of additional products we will be introducing later this year.”

Quantum will showcase the F2000 at its booth SL4409 at the 2019 NAB Show, April 8-11.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Elizabeth (Liz) King has joined Quantum Corp. as chief revenue officer, the company announced today.

With more than 25 years in global sales and leadership experience spanning enterprise, public sector and telecom industries in more than 30 companies, King is a veteran of the IT market who has held key executive leadership, sales, general and product management, services, marketing, supply chain and operations roles, the company said.

“Quantum touches people’s lives every day in surprising ways,” said King. “I’m excited about the potential I see to extend the company’s reach, and to touch society in so many impactful ways.”

Before joining Quantum, King was SVP, SGI Worldwide Sales for Hewlett Packard Enterprises. Before that, she was VP of strategic alliances for IBM and global systems integrators at Juniper Networks, the company said. She also has held positions at Hitachi Data Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Sun Microsystems, Raytheon and Texas Instruments.

King earned an MBA in management from the University of Dallas and has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Lehigh University.

“Liz has been successful at seizing market opportunities and driving sales teams to achieve profitable revenue growth for some of the most respected companies in Silicon Valley,” said Jamie Lerner, president and CEO of Quantum.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Quantum has upgraded its Xcellis appliances powered by the company’s StorNext file system.

The new appliances are based on a next-generation server architecture that includes dual 8-core Intel Xeon CPUs, 64 GB memory, SSD boot drives, and dual 100Gb Ethernet or 32 Gb Fibre Channel ports. The significantly enhanced CPU and 50 percent increase in RAM over the previous generation greatly improve StorNext metadata performance, according to the company, making file auditing less time intensive, provide support for an even greater number of clients per node, and enable the management of billions of files per node. Customers operating in a dynamic application environment on storage nodes will also see performance improvements, the company said.

Quantum says that the 100 Gb Ethernet and 32 Gb Fibre Channel connectivity option allows customers to utilize the latest generation networking infrastructure between their clients and storage arrays, thereby accelerating workflows and improving productivity. Combined with StorNext’s capability to provide the most comprehensive and coordinated file accessibility over NAS, SAN, and DLC architectures, the new platform offers industry-leading architectural flexibility, Quantum said.

The new version of Xcellis gives customers the ability to provide cross-protocol locking for shared files across SAN, NFS, and SMB, optimizing performance for collaborative workflows and the ability to share content across both Fibre Channel and Ethernet. This will allow StorNext to provide even higher levels of streaming performance for video playback, with even greater reliability, according to Quantum.

Xcellis appliances provide a high-performance gateway for StorNext advanced data management software to integrate tiers of massively scalable on-premise and cloud-based storage. This end-to-end capability provides a cost-effective solution to retain massive amounts of data according to Quantum. In addition, StorNext offers a variety of important features that ensure data-protection of valuable content over its entire life-cycle. Customers can easily copy files to off-site tiers and take advantage of versioning to roll back to an earlier point in time (prior to a malware attack, for example) as well as set up automated replication for disaster recovery purposes, all designed to protect valuable digital assets.

Quantum’s latest Xcellis appliances are available now.

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from a recent white paper “Comparison of the Media Archiving Options and Costs for M&E,” commissioned by Quantum. 

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—Television stations, video producers and post houses are awash in content data, and with each passing year the demand for storage only increases. A mid-market TV station producing two hours of news each weekday will create 15 TB of data per year, which means even a small station group with six or seven stations will churn out 100 TB of content to store on a yearly basis.

That figure is significant because after only a few years this hypothetical small station group will reach the 500 TB point, a threshold—give or take several terabytes—at which time it begins to make financial sense to store this content on a lower-cost medium and free up higher-performance, more costly storage resources for more productive uses.

“Now that everyone has woken up to the fact that content is king and has long-term value, they are beginning to understand that it also has a significant cost to store,” said Steve Davis, an Atlanta- based media storage consultant who formerly was senior vice president and CTO of Crawford Communications. “It grows and grows and grows. And the bit rates are high.”

When media enterprises reach their threshold, they have three options for long-term media archiving: on-premise digital magnetic tape-based archival storage in a Linear Tape-Open (LTO) library; the cloud–either public or private; or some hybrid combination of the two.

Before choosing, these enterprises must consider four important factors: cost, performance, accessibility and security. Additionally, in some situations the operational model of a business is a fifth factor that must be part of any evaluation. Specifically, how a business operates will determine whether it is better served by making an upfront capital investment in storage technology or by choosing a recurring monthly operational expense to archive media assets.

IN THE CLOUD

Public cloud storage services, such as those offered by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, have captured the attention of media and entertainment enterprises for archiving content, largely because of pricing. However, determining the true cost of cloud archiving can be tricky. First, an M&E enterprise must decide whether it needs fast access to data stored in the cloud or it can wait a longer time to retrieve its content.

Amazon Web Services illustrates the point. Its low-cost Glacier storage ($0.004 per gigabyte per month as of this writing), which is intended for archiving applications, typically can take three to five hours for a standard retrieval. Its more expensive S3-IA (Simple Storage Service-Infrequent Access) service ($0.0125 per gigabyte per month as of this writing) promises low latency and high throughput.

Other costs, such as the per gigabyte price of data retrieved from storage, what it cost to make retrieval requests and the cost of bandwidth to connect an enterprise’s site with the cloud, must be factored in.

When it comes to security, cloud service providers contend it is impossible for a media enterprise to replicate the level of data protection they offer. They argue no media business will outspend them on the steps they take to keep data secure, and they have the certifications to prove it.

Public cloud services also can provide geo-spacing which protects archived data against the ravages of localized natural disasters, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes, by distributing data across multiple geographies.

ON-PREMISE STORAGE

M&E enterprises considering LTO-based digital storage for on-premise archiving will face an unavoidable capital expense to put a system in place. They will need an LTO robotic loader, tape drives and a tape management system.

Other associated expenses include the costs of LTO tape, the square footage needed for the system and personnel to attend to it, said Jim Casabella, president of The Jim Casabella Consulting Group in Memphis, Tenn. Enterprises should also plan for the expense of migrating to newer generations of LTO storage with time, incurring new capital costs in the process, he said. However, it should be noted that a provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 allows certain businesses to expense 100 percent of the cost of most business equipment in the first year.

Still, when measured on a per gigabyte basis, the cost of storing archival data on LTO tape maintains its advantage against other alternatives, said Casabella, who specializes in consulting with media organizations about storage archive solutions and asset management.

In terms of performance, retrieving data stored on-premise from an LTO-based library typically takes seconds or at most a few minutes. The latest generation of LTO storage technology, LTO 8, offers a data transfer rate of 360 MBps native and 750 MBps compressed.

When it comes to protecting data from entropic damage, monitoring and managing data stored on tape must be considered. Technology exists to scan LTO-stored data to validate its integrity and takes the necessary steps to protect it by automatically making a new copy of the data on a fresh tape.

Beyond this level of data protection, there is the question of maintaining the physical security of LTO tapes from theft or natural disasters. Multiple copies of tapes can be stored at different locations to protect against calamities. However, doing so also multiplies the steps needed to safeguard against theft and piracy, all of which can be planned for and professionally executed.

A HYBRID ARCHIVE

It’s common for mid-size and large M&E organizations to have multiple workflows, each with its own storage requirements. As a result, many organizations have chosen to leverage the value of a hybrid archive solution based both on cloud and on-premise storage resources. A hybrid strategy also can offer M&E enterprises the benefit of taking advantage of the best of both archiving alternatives.

Security is a good example. “You can write a copy to AWS and two to tape,” explained Nils Carson, system architect at Quantum, a provider of LTO-bases archiving solutions. “Take one copy out and send it to Iron Mountain or some other repository with the same physical security. That way you have ultimate control and can pull back any one of those copies at any time.”

Similarly, organizations can mold a hybrid approach that leverages the strengths of both the cloud and on-premise archiving when it comes to performance, accessibility and cost.

Cloud bursting, a technique to scale up processing power by leveraging more CPUs and GPUs as needed in the cloud to accomplish a compute-intensive task, offers a good use case that illustrates how M&E enterprises can take advantage of the best of both storage options.

For instance, a hypothetical media enterprise that wishes to use cloud-based artificial intelligence tools, such as speech-to-text functionality and facial recognition, to generate useful metadata describing archived video assets, can take advantage of processing power in the cloud and continue to use on-premise storage to achieve its specific cost, accessibility and security goals.

In this hybrid application, a media enterprise can temporarily push a portion of its archive—most likely lower-resolution proxy files—to the cloud where AI processing can create additional metadata. The metadata can then be retrieved and married to the on-premise archival copy, while the version of the metadata in the cloud as well as the proxy files can be discarded. The process can be repeated as budget allows until the entire LTO-based library has been updated with enhanced metadata, explained Casabella.

MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE

While the pros and cons of each archiving option are sure to change as pricing models fluctuate, networking technologies evolve and storage media advances, enterprises without an archive strategy in place are at risk of spiraling cost structures, a loss of productivity and missing out on business opportunities.

However, with a solid archiving strategy in place, M&E enterprises can free up costly storage for more productive, revenue-generating uses while ensuring their valuable archives of media content remain safe and accessible for the long term.

RIO DE JANEIRO—Launched in 2012, Fox Sports Brasil has taken the lead in bringing world-class sports to as many viewers as possible, and has quickly become a top sports broadcaster in Brazil. We own rights to several exclusive sporting events, including the 2018 FIFA World Cup—which set new viewership records for the channel.

With such a massive amount of content to broadcast, and viewers wanting to access this content across a variety of platforms, we needed a sophisticated archiving technology solution that could help meet this demand—one that would be easy to manage and have enough capacity to hold our increasing collection of sports footage. Beyond that, we also needed to improve our ability to find content in our archives. Given the growing demand, generating new content through archive footage had become just as important as delivering live sports.

However, in looking to deliver this footage, finding the right content proved to be nearly impossible. Luckily, a good portion of our archive content was on YouTube, and we found that the ability to search historical video footage on YouTube was good enough to yield adequate results. Unfortunately, the quality of this footage was rather poor since it had been formatted multiple times for different platforms. It didn’t take long to realize we needed to find a better way.

THREE CRITERIA

We determined three criteria our ideal solution would meet. First, it had to be able to not only enrich the metadata of our numerous ingest streams, but also scan and enrich the archives. Next, it needed to be appropriately automated and simple to manage. Finally, the entire workflow had to remain on-premise, due to security concerns about moving our archive into the cloud, and cost considerations of frequently retrieving data. We settled on an artificial intelligence (AI) solution, since AI can be used to enrich volumes of metadata through cognitive engine processing.

After an extensive review, it became clear that Quantum provided the only option that met all of our criteria, including leveraging AI. The Quantum team—working with Seal Broadcast & Content—built a hybrid-cloud AI platform based on Quantum’s Xcellis storage appliance. This AI solution connects transparently to StorNext, Quantum’s file system for protecting, preserving and accessing rich media content.

We can now easily index and access 60,000 hours of archived content and live programming, and the AI-enabled workflow allows us to search content more rapidly to meet aggressive production deadlines.

A BETTER BROADCAST BUSINESS

The business impacts of the new solution have been immense. We can more quickly find the archived footage we need. And now that the entire archive is searchable, we’re constantly finding more relevant and compelling footage. And last but not least, the end product is of much higher quality. Ultimately, Quantum’s StorNext-based Xcellis on-premise solution has enabled us to be more agile, cost-effective and productive, and has gotten viewers across Brasil even more engaged with their sports content.

Luis Santos, vice president of Engineering & Operations for Fox Sports Brasil has worked in the sports and entertainment industry since 1995. He moved to the Fox Network Group in 2011 to launch Fox Sports Brazil Channels. He can be reached atLuis.Santos@Fox.com.

For more information, please visitwww.quantum.comor call 800-667-6268.

Media & Entertainment companies around the world face the same problem: how best to archive an ever-increasing number of video assets in a way that’s affordable, accessible and secure. This new white paper examines the benefits and limitations of three popular archiving strategies and how they are being deployed to meet the archiving and disaster recovery needs of media companies.

The white paper explores:

• Key considerations in choosing an archive strategy
• Costs associated with using a public cloud service and on-premise LTO tape to archive media
• How a hybrid of cloud and on-premise LTO-based archiving offers M&E enterprises greater flexibility
• How to leverage massive GPU and CPU availability while archiving on-premise to make assets easily accessible
• How station groups with as few as six TV stations can work together to make archiving affordable

Click here to download now.

WASHINGTON—The Government Video Expo, held Nov. 27-29, has an image of the U.S. Capitol building in its logo, but the reality on the floor is bigger than one building or just the federal government market alone. Indeed, a glance at attendee show badges on the exhibition floor or at the conference shows an eclectic mix of media professionals from many arenas.

While attendees included personnel from local, state and federal governments and all the agencies and contractors within that leviathan, this base was joined by representatives from state and local emergency personnel, defense-related contractors, educational institutions, houses of worship, and plenty of regional production types and broadcasters.

The conference schedule also reflected this. While many presentations and speakers were quite government-specific, broader topics such as live streaming, LED lighting advancements, SMPTE 2110, and high dynamic range video appealed to many modern media professionals.

TOPICS AND TRENDS

The SMPTE ST 2110 Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks suite of standards has been the hot topic at trade shows of late, and it was on the minds of many at GV Expo. The importance of the new standard was reflected in the addition of the day-long SMPTE in DC: Essential Technology Advances for Media Pros Conference, which attracted a number of local broadcast and media professionals eager to dig deep into the implications of IP on their media operations.

On the exhibit floor, the big buzz words were 4K, UHD and IPTV, according to Tommy Goodson, president of AudioVideo BrandBuilder (AVBB) Corp. “What we’re hearing at this show in particular is a lot about IPTV, with 2110 on the agenda … everybody who has come by is preparing for 2110.”

AVBB—a master distributor and manufacturer rep primarily for test and measurement specialist Phabrix and streaming company Teracue—said it was seeing great interest in the 2110-friendly Phabrix line, including the Sx-TAG model and the Qx IP, a fully flexible 2110 rasterizer.

Also popular was Teracue’s iCUE Grid Video Wall, is an IP Video Wall Presenter for multiple content sources within the video wall. It allows complete on-the-fly control over visualized live and/or on-demand content in any resolution.

AR/VR was present on the exhibition floor within products and at the conference, but the technology is a bit less in-your-face at trade shows now. The same can be said for artificial intelligence, which also had a decent presence on the conference schedule, but was not plastered on every booth on the exhibition floor as has been seen at events over the last few years. This may reflect the technology maturation, as AI or AR/VR are now established products or part of established products.

An example is Quantum’s StorNext media workflow file system. More than a year ago the company had announced it would offer Veritone Inc.'s multi-engine AI platform in a StorNext-managed environment. At GV Expo, the incorporation was a reality and AI is now just part of an overall system. There were no flashy robots on display representing the brave new world of AI, but representatives from Veritone did attend Day One of the show.

StorNext has applications across broadcast, security, defense and other environments that generate lots of data that needs to be evaluated and used. NewTek’s Tricaster multicamera production system also has a broad range of applications. It was on show at the booth of Washington Professional Systems, a dealer/integrator from nearby Wheaton, Md., that is also a NewTek Elite Dealer selling the systems across several market areas.

“The Tricaster product line is versatile enough that it is not just a broadcast switcher, there is so much more under the hood that allows it to be used in many AV environments,” said Jeremy Morris, Sr. Engineer & Certified Tricaster Operator with WPS. WPS’s booth also demonstrated products from Crestron, Christie and others.

WPS also had Sony broadcast and robotic cameras on hand, but the media world has seen a merging of the consumer and professional areas over the last several decades, so it makes sense that Sony had its own consumer electronics presence at the show as well. Highlights at this stand included still cameras capable of shooting some impressive video, and high end consumer camcorders such as the FS5 Mk II and the FS7 Mk II, both of which can shoot in 4K.

Sony professional cameras, along with units from Hitachi and JVC, were also present at the large, central booth of Digital Video Group (DVG), a supplier and system integrator of broadcast and production systems.

Alex Martin, DVG CEO, said the company was looking to expand its government business with its offerings, which also included asset management and shared storage from Avid, bonded cellular transmission units from LiveU, and more. Martin said show trends that cut across customers included the real need for 4K and preparing for SMPTE 2110.

PRODUCTION AS BREAD AND BUTTER

Whatever the resolution of the video is, and whether it is sent around a facility as an SDI stream or as an IP packet, production needs will always include camera support and lighting. These needs were front-and-center at Vitec.

On display was the Vinten flowtech 75 set of two-stage carbon fiber tripod legs with a removable mid-level spreader, rubber feet, and a 44-pound payload. This established unit was joined by the flowtech 100, which was only launched a few months ago. Compatible with all major 100 mm fluid heads, flowtech100 supports a payload of up to 66 pounds, making it ideal for heavy-duty ENG/EFP and a wide range of wildlife, commercial, and documentary productions.

Joseph Teodosio, Training & Product Specialist for Vitec, said the first day of the show drew a nice mix of local TV stations, government and military and house of worship (HOW) customers: “The LitePanels Gemini has been a real draw with its very high quality light, and the new flowtech 100 is also attracting people.”

Greg Smalfelt, senior cable television engineer, Communications Production Division, and Josh Bass, cable TV engineer, both with Fairfax County, Va.’s Channel 16, came to see the 100. “We’re an existing customer but we wanted to see the 100 for our bigger cameras, and get some questions answered,” said Smalfelt.

Panasonic was also out in force with a range of production kit for needs ranging from broadcast to HOW to government video entities. The AU-EVA1 compact cinema camera and a new class of PTZ remote cameras and controllers capable of operating in 4K 60 and 50p were joined by the AV-HLC100 small switcher, which is capable of direct streaming to YouTube or Facebook Live.

Smaller scale routing and switching needs were also key at AJA, where the company’s affordable Kumo routers and KiPro Ultra+ recorders were on display. Eastern region territory manager for AJA Dan Wingard said the duo were perfect for many of the potential customers walking the aisles. “We see everything from Federal, state and local government people through to community colleges, really a little bit of everything,” said Wingard.

Barbizon, a distributor of lighting, rigging, projection kit and more, said there was a lot going on in the world of LEDs in 2018. One of the big things this year is that a lot of the LEDs are now IP-rated, which has nothing to do with packets of data but is a measure of the protection an item will have against solid objects (dust, sand, dirt, etc.) and liquids, according to Kearston Dillard-Scott, Outside Sales representative for Barbizon. “Variety is also a trend,” said Dillard-Scott. “Many of the fixtures that were bi-color just from warm to cool can now do full RGB.”

Project Manager for Barbizon Sam Herbig added that the quality of an LED fixture’s light was increasing, and consistency within a product line has greatly improved from a few years ago: “It’s boring, but for anyone lighting to a level it is important,” said Herbig.

IP packets play a large role in an interesting product from Comrex that was on display, and due for shipping before year-end after being launched at the 2018 NAB Show: The VoIP-based Earshot IFB. The hardware-based system delivers live audio feeds to callers and is designed to provide telephone-based live studio program and IFB audio to field-based remote broadcasts, like TV ENG reports or in other applications.

Comrex also had an app called “FieldTap,” which allows a user to connect to Comrex codecs in studio from a cellphone with high-quality wideband audio.

According to Chris Crump, senior director of sales and marketing for the Devens, Mass.-based company, the Comrex LiveShot Portable IP video codec for live wireless newsgathering are in use across government sectors, particularly emergency management and security entities, along with community broadcasters. LiveShot delivers live, two-way, HD video and audio over a range of IP and cellular networks at latencies as low as less than 200mS, he said.

MISSION CRITICAL

Many government and defense video applications are defined as “mission critical,” a niche Oregon-based Planar covers with its narrow pixel pitch direct view LED and LCD panels. “These are purpose-built for mission-critical and mission-command applications, with higher image quality for indoor applications," said Alberto Reyes, director of federal business development for Planar. “We’re now finding other applications as well, any discerning 24/7/365 application in a signage environment really.”

Advances in projection display were evident at the booth of Christie Digital Systems.

“We’re trying to take a leadership position on RGB laser phosphor technology, said Jon Litt, senior manager, Business Development, Government, for Christie. “We’re also trying to bring it to a price point where it would work for more applications.”

Litt said the technology offered tremendous image fidelity, quiet operation, and the ability to run for years with little or no maintenance. Longevity is also a key selling point for the company’s DirectView LED screens, which Litt said had an expected lifespan of 100,000 hours or more while offering exceptional contrast.

HIGH SECURITY CAPTIONING

Captioning is often a government requirement and EEG has been offering encoders that connect broadcasters to iCap, the largest closed captioning and subtitle delivery network in the world, according to the company. While iCap provides 24/7/365 connectivity to thousands of certified caption partners around the globe, new at GV Expo was an option that allows customers to connect to an iCap network via a private VPN, with no public internet connection as part of the process.

“Some customers don’t want any public internet as part of the network, and now that is an option with iCap On-Prem,” said Dave Watts, marketing manager for EEG. iCap On-Prem is a companion product to EEG’s cloud-based delivery network, and it enables the deployment of iCap to private on-premises clouds for customers who require this configuration to accommodate extremely stringent internal security policies. Also on display was an automatic captioning product that relies on Ai and context recognition, and a SMPTE 2110 product.

Security was also key for IBM Watson Media, the end-to-end streaming platform formerly known as UStream: The tagline on the product’s data sheet is “Engage your employees with security-rich video.”

S. Scott Grizzle, WW Cloud Video Solutions Engineer with Watson, said the use cases between a broadcast customer and an enterprise or government customer were different, but there was a lot of crossover. He added that many customers across product sectors were become increasingly interested in video enrichment, where software can identify elements such as scenes, people, animals, etc. and place this information in to metadata.

Equipment aimed at consumers can do a lot of what many media pros need done in 2018. It is perhaps with this in mind that show organizer Future US just announced the launch of The Video Show, a new dual-event venture for December, 2019. The Video Show will pair The Photography Show, now an established U.K.-based event, with the iconic Government Video Expo, which celebrated its 23rd edition this year. 

The event takes place Dec. 3-5, 2019 at the Washington Convention Center. 

LAS VEGAS—Quantum will use the 2018 NAB Show as an introduction to enhancements to its Xcellis workflow storage family and StorNext shared storage and data management platform.

The new Xcellis Scale-out NAS platform delivers scalable Ethernet-based storage, combines high-performance media and metadata management to support collaborative workflows. Powered by StorNext, Xcellis tackles data-intensive workloads, including 4K/UHD editing, VFX creation and color correction.

An Xcellis NAS cluster can scale performance and capacity, together or independently, to reach hundreds of petabytes in capacity and more than a terabyte per second in performance. Also, the new Xcellis Foundation entry-level NAS appliance enables greater collaborative StorNext media workflows.

Xcellis also adds aiWARE, a hybrid on-premises and cloud version of the Veritone artificial intelligence platform that lets users use cognitive analytics, such as object recognition, optical character recognition and transcription, to extract hidden value from video and audio stored on Quantum appliances.

By indexing and grouping content, ClarityNow for Xcellis makes it easier to attach exact costs to storage related to specific content and projects, and keeps these collections in the most economical and appropriate storage medium.

With its StorNext 6 release, Quantum provides new data management options and global collaboration. It includes FlexTier public/private cloud access, making it easier to integrate existing public-cloud storage accounts and third-party object storage (private cloud) into a StorNext environment.

The new FlexSpace shared archive feature lets multiple StorNext systems anywhere in the world share a common content repository. Another feature, FlexSync Multisite Synchronization, uses enhanced file-system metadata monitoring to detect changes made to content in one location and immediately update it across related StorNext systems globally.

The 2018 NAB Show takes place in Las Vegas, April 9-12. Quantum will be in booth SL8511. For more information, visit www.nabshow.com.

Read up on all of TVT's NAB Show Sneak Peeks and other 2018 NAB Show news here.  

ST. LOUIS—At Bruton Stroube, we have been telling stories through compelling images for more than three decades, first through photography and now with video. Today our capabilities include a complete range of production, post production, sound design, transcoding and delivery services, and we work on everything from ads and PSAs to short-form documentaries.

When we first expanded from photography into video production, we recognized that video workflow and storage requirements are dramatically different than for still images. So, we built our system from the ground up—evolving with the technology as needed. The Quantum StorNext shared storage and data management platform has played a fundamental role in enabling this growth.

The StorNext platform enables Bruton Stroube to record and store content in 4K/UHD.

EVOLVING WITH THE TECH
In our early days of video production, when lower-bitrate HD formats were adequate, we adopted Mac platforms as our standard and used local storage arrays to support the workflow. Then, as resolutions and bitrates increased and we started shooting in 4K and RAW formats, we added an Apple Xsan server and expanded to about 20 TB of storage capacity. Giving us shared high-performance Fibre Channel access to our content, the Xsan really made everything easier, but camera technology quickly outran what the system could do. When we moved to the latest Red Epic-W cameras and started capturing everything in 6K or 8K, we were swamped. Typical shoots were creating a couple terabytes a day, doubling our storage needs.

The demands of higher-resolution video formats pushed us to look for a more robust solution that could provide scalability and excellent performance, while maintaining compatibility with Xsan. It also needed to be affordable. We knew that StorNext and Xsan had compatible technology and we had already used StorNext licenses to integrate a Windows workstation for 3D projects into the Xsan environment. But we didn’t think a shop like ours—modest in size with three active edit stations—could possibly afford it. Fortunately, after discussing the possibility with long-time collaborators Jason Knopp of Knopp Consulting and systems integrator BrightSource IT, we discovered that in terms of features, performance and total cost, StorNext was our best option.

We also valued Quantum’s longterm commitment to the digital media market. With earlier investments, we found ourselves stranded when suppliers shifted business models and left us without support or a growth path. We were determined not to go through that again.

MEETING EXPECTATIONS
StorNext offered full compatibility with Xsan and all the applications used by our creative team. It also enabled high-speed, shared Fibre Channel access to multiple editors with seamless scalability, which supported the independent increase of capacity and performance as our requirements evolved. StorNext’s support of multiple storage tiers also allowed us to leverage different storage tiers for better cost management.

We opted to deploy a complete Quantum solution featuring StorNext software, Xcellis workflow storage appliances, QXS-series hybrid storage arrays and a Scalar i3 tape library. The Quantum team did a few days of on-site preparation and then, during lunch, simply switched the system over. When we returned, we had magically added about 72 TB to our existing volume and everything worked exactly as it had before.

In the months since the system has been up and running, we haven’t had a single second of downtime. StorNext has given us everything we had hoped for and it offers smart options for growth as our needs change.

James McKenzie resides in the St. Louis area, where he is a cinematographer at Bruton Stroube Studios. He can be contacted atjames@brutonstroube.com.

For more information, please visitwww.quantum.comor call 800-677-6268.

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Quantum today announced Xcellis Scale-out NAS, an Ethernet-based appliance, offering high level storage performance and scalability. Leveraging the company’s StorNext shared storage and data management platform, the Xcellis Scale-out NAS is a multiprotocol, multiclient system that bundles robust media and metadata management with high performance, the company said.

Quantum’s Xcellis Scale-out NAS delivers performance previously only available in a SAN for use in all-IP workflows. The new product can be user-configured for both scale-out SAN and NAS to ensure flexibility.

Benefits of the Xcellis Scale-out NAS include increased productivity in all IP environments, cost-effective scaling of performance and capacity, lifecycle, location and cost management and integrated artificial intelligence.

Available this month, Xcellis Scale-out NAS entry configurations and those featuring tiering start at less than $100 per terabyte (raw), the company said.

More information is available on the Quantum website.

LOS ANGELES—Quantum is demonstrating Xcellis Foundation, an entry-level workflow storage system designed to address the technical and budgetary requirements of small- to medium-sized post-production facilities and corporate video departments. Based on StorNext, the new system delivers the benefits of enterprise-class Xcellis storage in a NAS appliance for under $25,000. Xcellis Foundation is suitable for smaller video production facilities that need the benefits of a shared workflow but have limited budgets to spend on shared storage.

aiWARE for Xcellis is a new hybrid on-premise and cloud version of the artificial intelligence platform from Veritone. It allows users to leverage Veritone’s cognitive analytics―in areas such as object recognition, optical character recognition and transcription―to extract hidden value from their on-premise video and audio content.

Quantum will also feature the integration of Data Frameworks’ ClarityNow with Xcellis workflow storage, powered by StorNext. Together these technologies allow users to not only look at the physical nature of the storage environment to see where files are kept, but also to establish policies so files are moved in a way that yields the most capacity. By scanning content in near real time, building an index of that content, and then grouping similar content into collections, the integrated solution makes it easier to attach costs to storage related to specific content and projects. As a result, studios and other content creators can keep specific groups of content in the most economical and appropriate storage medium.

NEW YORK—A series of updates within the StorNext 6 platform will be demonstrated in Quantum's booth at the NAB Show New York. The updates focus on extending collaboration globally and providing new data protection options. StorNext 6 highlights include a new quality of service (QoS) feature that allows facilities to tune and optimize performance across client workstations, and on a machine-by-machine basis.

The new FlexSpace feature allows multiple instances of StorNext, located anywhere in the world, to share a common content repository. Any user within a StorNext environment can access, browse and pull files from a shared workspace. FlexSync enables users to synchronize content between multiple StorNext systems in a manageable and automated fashion. FlexSync supports one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one file-replication scenarios, and can be configured to operate on specific files, specific folders or entire file systems.

Quantum will exhibit in booth N336.

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—After its unveiling at the 2017 NAB Show, Quantum has officially made the StorNext 6 available for shipping. The latest release of the company’s StorNext workflow storage platform, the StorNext 6 ships with Quantum’s Xcellis shared storage systems adding advanced data management for 4K performance.

With this new StorNext model, Quantum has provided scalable storage to deliver high performance for 4K workflows. A new quality of service feature also allows users to tune and optimize performance across workstations; allocate specific bandwidth to individual workstations; and set parameters on bandwidth consumption. Another addition is the FlexSpace feature, which enables multiple instances of StorNext located anywhere to share a single storage repository; offers shared repositories for public and private cloud storage using the S3 protocol; and provides facilities for protected off-site content storage. There is also the FlexSync capability that provides a way to synchronize content between multiple StorNext instances. Other new features include copy expiration, selectable retrieve, content auditing and tracking, and focused Mac Finder results for improving file management.

With its integration to the Xcellis, StorNext 6’s features can support multi-tier storage systems encompassing flash, spinning disk, object storage, tape and the cloud.

The StorNext 6 is shipping with all newly purchased Xcellis offerings and is available at no additional cost to current Xcellis users running StorNext 5 under existing support contracts.

Moderator: Tom Butts, Editor-in-Chief, TV Technology
Featured Speaker: Dave Frederick, Senior Director of media and entertainment, Quantum

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—After making its debut in Las Vegas this past April at the 2017 NAB Show, Quantum is taking its new StorNext 6 storage platform abroad to showcase at IBC 2017. The company is also bringing its Xcellis system and additional products that can work in collaboration with the two products or independently.

Quantum has given the StorNext 6 platform a series of updates that will be demonstrated at IBC. One such update is a quality of service feature that enables facilities to tune and optimize performance across all client workstations and on a machine-by-machine basis. There is also the FlexSpace Shared Arhcive, which allows for multiple instances of StorNext located anywhere to share a common content repository. Finally, the FlexSync multisite synchronization update provides a way to synchronize content between multiple StorNext systems in a manageable and automated fashion.

For the Xcellis, Quantum will showcase its new 4K reference architectures. These architectures were created from real-world 4K testing and scaled for facilities from small to large. The reference architectures are tuned to deliver predictable-stream-count workloads for the full range of 4K formats.

Additional products that Quantum has on its plate are the FlexTier public and private cloud access system and the Veritone artificial intelligence platform. FlexTier is a cloud-access feature that allows for integration of existing public-cloud storage accounts and third-party object storage into a StorNext environment and familiar media workflows. The Veritone, meanwhile, is a multi-engine AI platform in a Quantum StorNext-managed environment; this includes the Veritone aiWARE platform.

Quantum will also host a presentation theater where it will provide demonstrations of live multistream 4K and 8K color correction and editorial workflows.

Quantum will be located at booth 7.B27 during IBC 2017, which runs from Sept. 15-19 in Amsterdam.

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—This summer will bring a new release of Quantum Corp.’s StorNext workflow storage portfolio with the addition of StorNext 6. Adding advanced data management features to the system, the StorNext 6 is designed to share and access content across teams and manage and protect archived content. The StorNext 6 will be offered in an integrated, multi-tier storage system with flash, spinning disk, object storage, tape and the cloud.

With real-world 4K testing and 4K reference architectures, the StorNext platform offers a new quality of service feature to specify bandwidth allocation to individual workstations for tasks like 4K playback or color correction; the QoS service can also set parameters to cap bandwidth for less timely or demanding tasks.

StorNext also has a new feature called FlexSpace, which allows multiple StorNext units share a single repository for increased collaboration. Files from different sites can be stored in a shared archive, as well as browsed and pulled from the repository. Shared archive options include both public cloud storage and private cloud storage or third-party object storage through FlexTier.

The new FlexSync feature provides the ability to synchronize content between multiple StorNext systems in an automated fashion. FlexSync supports one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-one file replication scenarios and can be configured to operate with specific files, specific folders or entire file systems. The feature can recognize changes instantly and begin reflecting those changes on another system.

Additional features for the StorNext 6 include copy expiration and selectable retrieve; file system auditing; online stripe group management; and focused mac finder results.

Quantum will begin shipping the StorNext 6 platform with all newly purchased Xcellis and StorNext M-Series offerings, as well as Artico archive appliances, in early summer.

Click on the Image to Enlarge

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Quantum has announced its purpose-built 4K video reference architectures that use its StorNext-powered, disk- and flash-based workflow storage systems to maximize 4K stream counts and optimize performance levels.

This new reference architecture allows Quantum to test storage medium and system configurations that deliver the best performance, capacity and cost for a workflow or use case. The testing provides performance characterization and identifies drive form factors for different media types.

The testing process involved 14 different storage configurations using six media formats. The results of these tests created four 4K reference architectures based on StorNext-powered Xcellis storage systems. The StorNext Base 4K supports up to 15 streams of compressed and two streams of full-aperture 10-bit uncompressed 4K. StorNext High Capcity 4K supports up to 24 streams of compressed and up to six streams of full-aperture 10-bit uncompressed 4K. StorNext Performance Disk 4K can support up to 28 streams for compressed and five for uncompressed; while StorNext All Flash 4K can handle 66 streams for compressed and up to six for uncompressed.

LAS VEGAS—At the 2017 NAB Show, Quantum is bringing storage solutions and architectures that maximize performance for compressed and uncompressed 4K workflows. Quantum will demonstrate how its Xcellis solution leverages StorNext technology and all-flash arrays to enable users to maximize workflow efficiency, especially for demanding color correction, high-end compositing and finishing workflows.

Xcellis

The Xcellis has been enhanced with lab-validated 4K reference architectures for handling intense 4K workloads and streaming. This testing included characterization of large- and small-form-factor disk drives, a variety of array configurations, and a complement of compressed and uncompressed 4K formats.

The company will also showcase FlexTier public and private cloud access capability, which makes it easier to integrate existing public cloud storage accounts and third-party object storage (private cloud) into the familiar StorNext media environment. With support for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, NetApp StorageGRID, IBM Cleversafe and Scality RING, FlexTier helps content owners reduce the cost and complexity of cloud storage management, while protecting their media assets and cloud storage investments.

Visitors to the Quantum booth will also see how StorNext environments foster creative collaboration since content creators around the world can access the same centralized storage and make their work immediately available to others on their team. There will also be hourly demonstrations of live multi-stream 4K color correction and editorial workflows delivered from Quantum storage systems, supported by the StorNext platform. 

The 2017 NAB Show takes place in Las Vegas, April 24-27. Quantum will be in boothsSL5705 and SL5810. For more information, visit www.nabshow.com.

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Crawford Media Services has created a content repository that is using Quantum’s Lattus object storage system for the migration of legacy content to digital formats and provides media storage and management. Lattus has been integrated with Crawford’s existing archive approach to create the company’s second-generation managed archive, Amber.

Lattus

The Lattus can hold 1.2 petabytes of archived assets as well as content ingested during new projects. The system also offers what is described as self-healing and self-migration capabilities to preserve the integrity of media files and infinite incremental scaling.

Quantum’s Artico archive appliance was also deployed with the Lattus system. This incorporated Quantum’s StorNext data management to move content to and from Lattus automatically while maintaining full access to the files. StorNext also enables to the company to write to tape for its clients.

Think you know all there is to know about 4K? Think again, says a new survey on this industry-changing format.

Whether it’s because of the stunning images, the relative ease of upconversion, the affordable price of the technology or a combination of all of these advantages, a growing number of broadcast and post-production organizations have welcomed 4K/Ultra HD into their everyday production workflows.

But the industry is being pushed to think beyond the initial purchase of 4K cameras to consider how this new format will impact workflow steps down the line—from editing technology all the way down to archiving.

A new survey conducted by TV Technology magazine and Quantum found a gap in expectations regarding the impact that these changes will have on basic infrastructure within broadcast and post-production facilities.

The report surveyed more than 400 media professionals about both the past and the future and asked respondents:

- What workflow changes have they already experienced during their transition to 4K?

- What changes do they still anticipate as they continue to upgrade their facilities to support 4K/UHD content production?

The findings were eye-opening. While 73 percent of respondents said that it was necessary to take initial steps such as upgrading or replacing cameras when adopting a 4K infrastructure, there were a few puzzling findings.

For example, only 37 percent of respondents expected they would need to upgrade or replace the network within the studio. This may mean that respondents are counting on advanced compression techniques to reduce the impact of larger 4K streams on their networks. Or perhaps these responses reveal that many media professionals have not yet come to terms with the full impact that 4K formats will have on their workflow and storage.

The survey also provided revealing information about the relationship between 4K and storage. Concerns about storage featured in two of the top four responses, namely anticipating increased storage costs and the need to upgrade or change storage architecture. After all, 4K comes with larger image sizes (quadruple the number of pixels used by 1080p) and higher data rates (eight times the bit rate of 720p or 1080i HD-SDI links). It is only logical to conclude that 4K/UHD signals will require larger amounts of storage and might also benefit from upgraded storage architecture.

“Even though overall penetration of 4K televisions in consumers’ hands remains low, video content production workflows have begun making the transition to a 4K/UHD future,” says Wes Simpson, industry consultant and architect of the 4K survey. “[New] activity on the consumer side [means] content providers are being forced to develop plans for making the transition to produce and deliver UHD content,” he says.

Plans are indeed being made.

Half of those who responded to the survey are using 4K in their facilities; the next group of adopters plan to do so within the next 24 months. That means that more than 70 percent of all organizations surveyed plan to invest in 4K by 2018.

It’s clear that 4K/UHD is becoming a key piece of mainstream workflows—starting with the camera and flowing through to archives. The key for both broadcast and post-production operations is to think about what kind of upgrades they will need to make—and when—to handle the flood of 4K/UHD content coming downstream.

RESOURCES

Quantum StorNext 5 Solutions: Broadcast

Smoothing the Transition to a 4K/UHD Future

From Hyper to Reality: How Does the Transition to 4K/UHD Really Affect Your Business

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—A new update of the StorNext platform from Quantuam, version 5.4, has been officially launched. StorNext 5.4 brings new enhancements to the workflow storage platform that includes the ability to integrate existing public cloud storage accounts and third-party object storage (private cloud), and the ability to deploy applications embedded within StorNext-powered Xcellis workflow storage applications.

The updated StorNext 5.4 offers automated, policy-based movement of content into and out of users’ existing public and private clouds, while maintaining the visibility and access that storage system provides. The integration of private and public clouds also encompasses primary disk and storage tiers, offers full access to media stored in the cloud without additional hardware or software, and extends versioning across sites and the cloud. This private-public cloud integration also enables the ability to leverage integrated cloud-transfer acceleration, as well as a selection of third-party WAN acceleration tools, and high-speed connectivity options for high-volume data transfers.

The StorNext 5.4 features a Dynamic Application Environment (DAE) capability enables applications to run inside the platform’s Xcellis Workflow Director, allowing users to leverage converged storage architecture. The DAE supports embedded applications in self-contained virtual machines, with a hypervisor allocating resources to guarantee both storage and application performance. DAE supports both Windows and Linux virtual machines, providing application flexibility and compatibility to the storage environment.

New connectivity options to the Xcellis are also part of the update, including quad 16Gb fiber channel and dual 4Gb Ethernet. Additional enhancements include new NAS capabilities, support for flash-based metadata controllers, improved monitoring and reporting, and automated over-the-air upgrades. Quantum has also refined its StorNext Connect management tools with an app-based framework that facilitates the independent installation, operation and updating of individual components while they are online.

Quantum is now offering the StorNext 5.4 with all newly purchased Xcellis, StorNext M-Series and StorNext Pro Solutions, as well as Artico archive appliances. Current StorNext 5 users can upgrade for free.

AYLESBURY, ENGLAND—It’ll be a team effort between TMD and Quantum to try and bring seamless archiving to its customers. To do so the companies are planning to integrate TMD Mediaflex-UMS media service applications with Quantum’s Xcellis workflow storage system. TMD has also joined the Quantum Advantage Program, a platform where partners can test and qualify their technology with Quantum offerings.

Mediaflex-UMS enables users to manage the lifecycle of media content, including creation, digitization, repurposing, enrichment, delivery, publishing and archiving. When paired with the StorNext-powered Xcellis, Mediaflex-UMS can preserve content and maximize its value over a lifecycle, according to companies’ press release.

“This partnership brings to customers a combination of highly scalable and cost-effective archive solutions with effective media management throughout every stage of the content lifecycle,” said Anniek Snauwaert, director of technology alliances at Quantum.

Here are five things Quantum Corp. wants attendees to know about the company before heading to the Government Video Expo. Quantum will be on the show floor in booth 221.

1.In use and continually developed since 1998, the Quantum StorNext file system and data management platform is used in more media and entertainment facilities than any other open system SAN solution.

StorNext is one of the most popular high-performance file systems for a very good reason: Nothing comes close when it comes to predictable and tunable performance. Combine this with built-in tiering and unified namespace management, and you end up with a storage system that serves as the reliable platform on which to deploy today’s technologies and adapt to new ones in the future.

2.StorNext has been successfully tested delivering uncompressed 8K 10-bit DPX image streams.

The same StorNext file system that allows a small post-production house to support a pair of editors collaborating on editorial projects just completed one of the most grueling tests of performance to which any storage system has been subjected. The bit-rate of a single stream of uncompressed 8K is a staggering 24 Gbps. That’s the equivalent of a single-layer Blu-ray Disc every three seconds.

3.Quantum’s StorNext can automatically reduce the cost of storing and managing data by keeping content visible and accessible on disk, object storage, tape and cloud.

With an integrated policy manager and data mover, StorNext can automatically transfer content from high-performance primary storage to lower-cost disk, tape or cloud for archive and delivery. This maximizes available primary storage space without sacrificing visibility and access to content for users and applications.

4.Xcellis with StorNext can be set up with 100-percent NAS client connectivity.

StorNext has long been known as a fibre channel-based system, and recent enhancements to StorNext and to Ethernet infrastructure now allow an entire facility to run via NAS or DLC.

5.Quantum Xcellis scale-out storage powered by StorNext now supports VM-based application deployments through the Dynamic Application Environment.

In the latest advance in StorNext infrastructure, the Xcellis Workflow Director now supports applications running directly on the storage controller. This reduces the need for a separate server and the associated network components when deploying applications that benefit from proximity to storage. There are already more than 10 developers that have applications available on the Xcellis Dynamic Application Environment.

NEW YORK—IP-based media workflow technologies are making way for a fully virtualized operation in which functions can be leveraged on-demand, and files can be considered by their constituent objects, like threads in a scarf that are unraveled and rewoven to suit the season.

“We also have a solution that well-proven over the years, and that’s SDI. In that context—what’s the problem I have to solve? I don’t know, but there’s sort of a natural evolution in all things, and certainly in technology, IP is the next step in that evolution,” said Jim DeFilippis to media professionals who gathered in New York last week for a one-day event, “The Impact of IP & Cloud on Media Workflow.”

DeFilippis opened the proceedings with a retrospective on that evolution, from tape-centric, linear operations to abstractions of those operations executed in the cloud; from following a tape cart down the hall to conjuring the digital equivalent on a screen.

DeFilippis, a Fox alum who now provides expertise to multiple clients, sat in on the first of three panel discussions exploring “The Impact of IP & Cloud on Media Workflow. He was joined by Gary Olson, principal of GHO Group, and Geoff Stedman, senior vice president of marketing and scale-out storage solutions for Quantum, which sponsored the event alongside Elemental, IPV, Telestream and CatDV.

MIGRATION 2IP
The discussions covered the status of IP and cloud technologies in terms of development and deployment. On the development side, there are standards and there are polite suggestions, proffered by a variety of groups, Olson said. The combination makes for an alphabet soup of acronyms: AIMS, VSF, ASPEN, NMI, NDI, TICO, TR-03 and -04, RFC 4175, ISO, SMPTE, IEEE, IETF, AMWA, JT-NM, EBU, etc. Most of the groups are inter-related and much of the work is ongoing.

“What are we trying to solve with all these standards? The maturity is going from your Best Buy router to a more sophisticated network,” he said.

Meanwhile, the ongoing development of multiple standards has folks waiting to purchase equipment. Panelists noted that the SDI-to-IP migration is a work in progress. Whereas the cost of SDI once was born by the entire industry, research and development funds are now going increasingly into IP, thus a shift is expected to follow.

Stedman noted that internet technology is in a continual state of development, and to “use IP technologies when you have a problem that it solves.”

What you can do in a server-based environment versus a proprietary environment is different, Olson said.

“You can have a traffic system that lives in a virtual machine, say, instead of having seven servers, you can have one server with seven slices. Right now, a managed switch has all the brains in the switch, and it has to be replicated across the fabric. With a software-defined network, you define it once and it replicates across the environment,” he said.

The discussion touched on the single-switch architecture reflective of the SDI environment, and how that concept may need to evolve in the IP world, where the last trouble-shooting step is the reboot. One attendee noted that his operation has bifurcated the network because of the number of functions that have to be performed. Stedman noted that in cases where a single switch is used, it has to be designed for peak load.

METADATA & HYBRID WORKFLOWS
During the second session of the day, TV Technology Executive Editor Deborah McAdams (R), moderated the “Changes in Media Management in a Hybrid Workflow Environment” panel with (L to R),James Varndell, technical product manager for IPV, Ryan Servant, vice president of North American business development for CatDV and James Snyder, senior systems administrator at the Library of Congress. The second panel of the day, with James Snyder, senior systems administrator at the Library of Congress, Ryan Servant, vice president of North American business development for CatDV, and James Varndell, technical product manager for IPV, discussed media asset management in the hybrid IP-SDI workflow environment.

This group concluded two things: no two operations are the same and the metadata management is increasingly crucial. This is especially true at the Library of Congress, where material has to be archived in a way that ensures searchability for the next 150 years. Consequently, search terms must be considered from a popular culture perspective because descriptives change over time.

Both Varndell and Servant said MAM providers are under pressure to provide customized systems. Servant said MAM platforms have to be designed to export in multiple delivery formats, and to play well with technology from multiple vendors.

This includes cloud technologies. Servant said that according to research carried out by CatDV, about 80 percent of end-users say they want to do “something” in the cloud over the next two years, they’re just not sure what. Security remains a concern with cloud technologies, as well as the costs associated with storage and retrieval, according to the research. (Ed note: This comment was originally and erroneously attributed to Mr. Varndell, and corrected Nov. 23, 2016.)

Panel No. 3 dug further into the cloud with input from Shawn Carnahan, chief technology officer of Telestream; Manual De Peña, eastern region senior field operations director for Amazon’s Elemental; and Eric Pohl, chief technology officer for National Teleconsultants.

SEND IN THE CLOUDS
De Peña said Elemental is performing proof-of-concepts for cloud-type deployments, “because people want to feel as comfortable going into the cloud as they do on prem.” He also mentioned the opportunity to leverage peripheral services a cloud provider may offer.

Carnahan said depending on where a client’s data is located, they’re probably going to want to be near it geographically to make bandwidth more manageable. He also noted how block storage is different from object storage, in that objects are encapsulated data constituents of blocks.

With object storage, Pohl said the idea is that APIs will be used to interact. He also described the flexibility of spinning up an infrastructure in the cloud.

“You can define your own virtual machines, and create your own LAN within the cloud. Most of these data centers are built on non-blocking architectures. You can sit down with a tool and define that within 10 minutes. You can go to Amazon and order the components you want and have them loaded onto a virtual machine.”

The downside, Pohl said, is that if you leverage a lot of the tools on AWS, for example, it has an impact on portability to say, Azure.

CLOUD 101
Stedman, who delivered the closing remarks, parsed cloud types and potential uses. So-called “private” clouds are dedicated, whether owned by a user or some other party. A public cloud can be viewed as a shared space, he said, and a hybrid environment blend both.

“The cloud fundamentally completely extracts hardware and software. When you write to Amazon, do you know what storage you write on? You don’t. You’ve completely lost sight of that hardware, and you don’t care as long as you have the SLA that you want. It applies equally to private and public clouds,” he said.

Another advantage is having access from anywhere, and the ability to scale up to handle workflow peaks as needed. Stedman also noted that while the size of media files has grown exponentially, the pricing of cloud storage has come down nearly as much, and connectivity costs remain flat. He predicted a lot of proxy interaction until connectivity costs come down.

He also noted that all public cloud is based on object storage, which provides “eleven nines” of reliability in that objects are replicated across the cloud.

“You can build an object store such that if a rack fails, a server fails even an entire data center fails, the object can still be retrieved,” he said.

Object storage also allows for capacity expansion without doing a major rebuild. Stedman said Quantum and its partners are exploring how content can be worked on in the object realm—without having to turn it back into files. Quantum also is working on multi-site, multi-cloud models, “so clients can adopt cloud technology from any source.”

In terms of applicability, cloud storage may be more appropriate for non-real-time operations like transcoding, rendering, QC, file delivery and archiving, while real-time activities such as editing may be better relegated to local, high-performance storage.

With regard to archiving in the cloud, a main consideration is frequency of retrieval. The higher the frequency, the more expensive the retrieval rate in the public cloud model. Therefore, a private cloud architecture would be more fiscally sensible.

“Make sure fee structures are understood. There are a lot of potential ‘gotchas.’ Read the fine print, he said. Your point-seven cents may have gone up to 2.5 cents.”

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Quantum has named Molly Rector as its new vice president, marketing. Rector joins the company after most recently serving as the chief marketing officer for DataDirect Networks.

Prior stops for Rector also included a 10-year stint at CMO and executive vice president of worldwide marketing and product management at Spectra Logic. She also founded the Active Archive Alliance, an industry coalition meant to teach about new technologies; she still serves on the Alliance board.

Quantum is a provider scale-out storage, data protection and archive technology.

Moderator: Deborah McAdams, Executive Editor, TV Technology
Featured Speaker: Thomas Coughlin, Founder of Coughlin Associates

Featured Speaker: Tom McDonald, Technical Marketing, Quantum

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Avid and Quantum Corp. have announced that they recently collaborated on a technology that will enable integration of Quantum’s archive storage systems into Avid environments. Specifically, Avid has developed a connector for its Interplay | MAM system and Quantum’s StorNext Storage Manager.

With the Avid connector, StorNext Storage Manager users can access and control the StorNext archive and restore functions through Interplay | MAM; this includes automated movement across different archive storage tiers, such as Quantum’s Lattus object storage, tape libraries and Q-Cloud services.

In addition to the new connector technology, Avid has joined the Quantum Advantage Program, according to the companies’ press release. The program provides a platform for partners to test and qualify technology with Quantum offerings.

Quantum and Avid will showcase the new archive systems at Avid Connect 2016 from April 16-17 and the 2016 NAB Show from April 18-21, both in Las Vegas.

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Denver-based post-production house Citizen Pictures works on lifestyle projects primarily for food-oriented networks and digital platforms. So to help ensure that nothing gets left on the burner and all deadlines are met, the company recently deployed an Xcellis workflow storage system, powered by Quantum’s StorNext platform.

The Xcellis integrates components of workflow storage into a single hardware system. Using the StorNext 5 platform, the Xcellis provides content production, distribution and archiving, as well as streaming performance for ingest, transcoding and delivery. The system also offers high-speed Fiber Channel SAN connectivity, LAN, SMB and NFS sharing options and IP connectivity.

In addition, the StorNext Connect is a full-featured management tool integrated into the Xcellis system that provides Citizen Pictures management and troubleshooting capabilities to identify and resolve issues for optimal performance and maximum uptime. It also supplies real-time monitoring and trending statistics.

Quantum is a provider of workflow storage, archive and data protection equipment.

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Crown Media Family Networks has announced it recently deployed Quantum’s StorNext 5 shared storage and Lattus object storage platforms to manage its video content. As the parent company of the Hallmark Chanel, the Quantum systems will allow Crown Media to provide a highly scalable content management that automatically preserves and protects its digital assets while also having them readily available.

The StorNext system is compatible with Crown Media’s previous Xsan online storage network while also offers seamless integration with Lattus. The Lattus uses object storage technology to create extended online storage with the ability to store up to hundreds of perabytes and provide a scalable and resilient environment. Crown Media’s Lattus configuration spreads content between two locations in Los Angeles and Denver.

When content is no longer actively being used, the StorNext system moves it from online storage to Lattus object storage while continuing to provide access through the StorNext file system and Levels Beyond Reach Engine.

Crown Media worked with Integrated Media Technologies to implement the Quantum systems.

NEW YORK—With the onset of 4K and higher-resolution video formats comes the inevitable impact on storage. By some accounts as much as 12 terabytes of content is being produced daily, and it has to be stored somewhere.

The cloud is increasingly becoming an option. Cisco’s annual Global Cloud Index report predicts cloud data centers could execute 78 percent of all IT workloads by 2018, compared to just 22 percent for traditional (on premise) data centers.

A GOOD TIME FOR TRANSITIONING?
Numerous broadcast vendors, as well as major players such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon offer off-site storage solutions where video can be transferred for longtime archiving and backup. With so many options, the time to make the transition to the cloud could be now, especially if existing hardware systems are due for an upgrade.

“For those operating on production systems that were installed in the 2007–09 timeframe, they are reaching the end of life, and now is the time to look to an infrastructure that is cloud-ready,” said Jay Batista, general manager of Tedial’s U.S. operations, a division of the Spanish-based provider of media asset management software.

The cloud can be used to archive content and also provide access as needed.

“This is a great time to look at your business,” Batista added. “If you are producing scripted programming and push it over to a distributor or syndicator the cloud offers a way to save daily raw cuts as well.”

Production facilities can also leverage the cloud and pump up the storage or ramp it down as needed for short-term storage said Batista, especially as there can be times when more media comes in due to peaks in a sports or news cycle.

Mike Palmer, vice president of business strategy at Masstech Innovations “For those looking at the news model or daily content that might need to be retrieved often, a privately hosted cloud service works best,” said Mike Palmer, vice president of business strategy at Masstech Innovations, a Markham, Ontario-based provider of digital media management systems. “It offers immediate access and the storage cost is low.”

It may be necessary to watch key performance indicators to determine when more or less cloud storage is needed in the short term.

“Those business analytics are available, and can be set up to measure traffic and how it corresponds to storage on the cloud,” said Batista. “It is this cyclical nature of business that will determine the best way to leverage the cloud.”

SEND AND FORGET
Although increasing file sizes could prompt more broadcasters and media companies to turn to the cloud for longterm archiving, the move is not without issues. In many cases the cloud could be a “send and forget” option primarily.

There are three main issues to consider when determining whether to archive to the cloud, according to Alex Grossman, vice president of media and entertainment at Quantum, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of storage management systems.

“The first issue is how secure is the cloud, so that you know it is archived but won’t get touched by anyone,” Grossman explained, adding that content owners should be able to feel secure that the cloud is reliable. “Are multiple [backup] copies maintained and how do you prove that?” he asked. The only way to ensure that the content has been actually backed up is to do auditing by downloading it and that can cost money.

The third issue isn’t just that the content will be there but that the cloud provider will be as well.

“What happens if the cloud vendor opts out of the business?” Grossman asked. “This leads to how you might move the content to a new place. These are the things not so much to worry about, but to consider when moving content to the cloud.”

The biggest issue however could remain cost, especially as video production moves to 4K, where files truly put the “big” in big data.

“One aspect to keep in mind with the cloud is that this isn’t a onetime payment,” said Chris Luther, director of professional services at SGL Broadcast, a U.K.-based provider of archive and storage management software for post production, news, sports and government. “You are in fact paying for that storage every month forever. It might only be a fraction of a cent per file, but files larger than 2GB often have to be broken up, and consider that 4K is about a gigabyte a minute. So every production needs to be broken up into two-minute chunks. In many cases we are seeing that broadcasters may be expecting too much of the cloud at this time.”

Michelle Munson, CEO, AsperaON THE DOWNLOAD
What goes up to the cloud will need to be downloaded when needed, and this is another factor that has to be considered, especially as cloud facilities could be geographically far from a production facility. The cloud is only going to be as reliable as the infrastructure to transport that data over vast distances, and should the connection be slow or unreliable, the data can be difficult, even impossible, to download or otherwise access. This creates more pressure on available bandwidth, according to Michelle Munson, CEO of Aspera, an Emeryville, Calif.- based next-generation software technologies transport vendor.

“We’re seeing that volume has grown and that only serves to take more bandwidth on the pipe,” she said. “Today you need to move terabytes of data, and we are striving to make all storage equal, independent of location or the amount of any data.”

The size of the files remains that issue, for the up and download.

“It is a double problem,” said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst of nScreenMedia a research firm that covers online media. “Today’s video files are massive if they are uncompressed and this takes up a lot of bandwidth, but every time the file is needed it can take a long time to download it.”

The time it takes to download is the other half of the equation, as the content might be safely archived but not immediately accessible when it is needed.

“It can take a long time to get the content, so in many cases you need to plan around it,” said Savva Mueller, director of product management at Masstech Innovations.

PRIVATE OR PUBLIC?
Some of the issues surrounding cloud archiving can also be overcome by creating a private cloud as opposed to utilizing a public cloud-based solution from Amazon or Microsoft.

“Public [cloud] at a price per gig can add up, and that can be a hard model to justify for archiving,” said Palmer. “Local storage to your own cloud servers can be a larger upfront cost, but you own that [cloud server] forever.”

Such a solution could be hosted externally or in a company’s own data center, and could take advantage of the economy of scale. A lot of this depends entirely on the type of content that is being archived and when it might be needed.

“If you are looking at a news model then a privately hosted model could be better,” added Palmer. “There is immediate access and the storage cost is low.”

By contrast, for short-term storage with a finite amount of data, a public cloud could be the better option. Yet the public option does mean giving up some control.

“There are still a lot of execs out there who are worried about the cloud,” noted Tedial’s Batista. “The content may not be secured and that can be a problem.”

In some cases these concerns are magnified based on where the public cloud may be located.

“You don’t have control where the data is stored,” said Luther. “Why would anyone trust that their content might not end up on a server in China and be replicated even before it is officially released in America?”

For the coming year, Munson expects that demand for cloud storage will continue to grow, even as issues such as file size, security and cost need to be addressed.

“The use of cloud infrastructure will become more commonplace,” she said. “It is no longer an experiment. We are seeing the industry take techniques from high-performance computing and tie it to video production.”

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—Quantum Corp. walked away from the 2016 Storage Visions Conference a winner, as its Xcellis high-performance shared workflow storage system was rewarded with the 2016 Storage Visions Award for Visionary Products, Professional-Class System. The Storage Vision Awards recognize companies advancing the state of the art in storage technologies and showcase visionary digital storage products.

The Xcellis system consolidates data and media management, extending connectivity options and supporting hosted applications. The system integrates components of workflow storage into a single hardware system that runs off of the Quantum StorNext 5 media workflow platform.

Other finalists for the Visionary Award included Aspera Files, Avid Isis 1000, DDN WOS 360 v2.0, HGST Active Archive System, Marvell 88NV1140/88NV1120 DRAM-less NVMe controller, Panasas ActiveStor 18, Primary Data DataSphere platform, Samsung SSD 950 PRO 512GB NVMe M.2 V-NAND SSD, Samsung SM863 Enterprise, SSD, Solidfire All Flash storage system, and Spectra Logic ArticBlue.

The 2016 Storage Visions Conference took place from Jan. 4-5 at the Luxor Conference Center in Las Vegas.