IBC 2017: Quantum to get busy in Amsterdam
Quantum will showcase StorNext 6, a major new release of the company’s workflow storage platform. Quantum also will highlight its award-winning Xcellis solutions, recently enhanced with lab-validated 4K reference architectures for facilities of all sizes and including all-flash storage configurations that maximise performance for high-quality 4K streams.
Features and capabilities within StorNext 6 and Xcellis give users greater control over storage performance across the entire facility, enable exceptional efficiency and productivity for 4K workflows, facilitate seamless access to content for geographically distributed creative teams and simplify use across operating systems.
A series of substantive updates within the StorNext 6 platform will be demonstrated, with a particular focus on enabling high resolution workflows. StorNext 6 highlights include:
Quality of Service – A new quality of service (QoS) feature that empowers facilities to tune and optimise performance across all client workstations, and on a machine-by-machine basis, in turn guaranteeing that more demanding tasks, such as 4K playback or colour correction, get the bandwidth they need to maintain uncompromising video quality.
FlexSpace Shared Archive – Addressing the challenges of global always-on production workflows, the new FlexSpace feature allows multiple instances of StorNext, located anywhere in the world, to share a common content repository. As a result, any user within a StorNext environment can access, browse and pull files from a shared workspace. With this game-changing new capability, a creative team member working in one city can create content that is automatically stored to the common repository and immediately available for further work by team members working elsewhere without it being expressly shipped or explicitly transported to them.
FlexSync Multisite Synchronisation – FlexSync is a powerful new capability that provides a fast, flexible and simple way to synchronize content between multiple StorNext systems in a highly 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 at almost any level: specific files, specific folders or entire file systems. By leveraging enhancements in file-system metadata monitoring, FlexSync recognises changes instantly and can immediately begin reflecting those changes on another system.
Quantum will highlight its FlexTier cloud-access feature, which makes it easy to integrate existing public-cloud storage accounts and third-party object storage (private cloud) into a StorNext environment and into familiar media workflows. FlexTier currently supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, NetApp StorageGRID, IBM Cleversafe and Scality RING as archive tiers. As a result, content owners can get all the content access and visibility benefits provided by StorNext, protect their investments in private-cloud object storage systems and public-cloud storage services, and reduce the cost and complexity of cloud storage administration.
Quantum will highlight its new 4K reference architectures, created from exhaustive real world 4K testing and suitably scaled for facilities from small to large. In the testing, all Xcellis solutions were validated under intense 4K workloads, reflecting industry leading capabilities for streaming 4K to collaborative teams of content creators. The testing included characterisation of large and small form factor disk drives and all-flash arrays in different configurations of compressed and uncompressed 4K formats. The resulting reference architectures have been tuned to deliver predictable-stream-count workloads for the full range of 4K formats.
During IBC2017, Quantum will showcase Veritone’s multi-engine artificial intelligence (AI) platform in a Quantum StorNext-managed environment. Veritone aiWARE, a hybrid on-premise and cloud version of Veritone’s cloud-based AI platform, will be offered as an integrated solution with StorNext workflow storage. This combination will allow users to use the power of Veritone’s cognitive analytics along with top cognitive engines in areas such as object recognition, optical character recognition and transcription, to extract new value from their on-premise video and audio content without moving it to the cloud.
Within the presentation theatre on Quantum’s stand, the company will provide demonstrations of live multistream 4K and 8K colour correction and editorial workflows. Showcasing the performance leadership of Xcellis and other Quantum storage systems, these demonstrations will give attendees a firsthand look at the remarkable performance levels that can be achieved with the optimal hardware configuration, supported by the powerful StorNext platform.