NAB 2017: Quantum To Highlight Advances in Workflow Storage
Quantum (Booth SL5705, SL5810) will showcase its continued leadership in workflow-optimized storage, giving attendees a look at several key enhancements that boost workflow efficiency and agility.
Featured will be its award-winning Xcellis workflow storage solutions, recently enhanced with lab-validated 4K reference architectures for facilities of all sizes, and including all-flash storage configurations that maximize performance for high-quality 4K streams, including uncompressed formats. In addition, Quantum will unveil new shared-archive workflow architectures that enable distributed teams to collaborate worldwide through digital-content libraries. Together, these enhancements 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.
“At the 2017 NAB Show,” says Dave Frederick, senior director, media and entertainment, “we will showcase significant new capabilities within the StorNext platform and 4K reference architectures built on Xcellis workflow storage that empower users to take workflow efficiency and productivity to a higher level. We look forward to demonstrating how these advances make it easier and more cost-effective for media facilities of all sizes to embrace demanding projects, including 4K work, and to increase the productivity of their collaborative workflows within and across StorNext-enabled sites.”
New Xcellis 4K Reference Architectures
Following real-world 4K testing, Quantum will unveil new 4K reference architectures, suitably scaled for facilities small to large. In the testing, all Xcellis solutions easily handled intense 4K workloads, reflecting industry-leading capabilities for streaming 4K to collaborative teams of content creators. The testing included characterization of large- and small-form-factor disc drives, a variety of array configurations, and a full complement 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.
Xcellis Workflow Storage With All-Flash Options
Quantum will also demonstrate how Xcellis leverages the power of StorNext and the performance of all-flash arrays to get the most out of both technologies. StorNext enables users to maximize workflow efficiency. This is no different with flash when it comes to meeting or exceeding the needs of the most demanding workflows, with use cases like color correction or high-end compositing and finishing deriving the greatest benefit.
Collaborative Workflows via Shared Archive
New capabilities to be showcased allow multiple StorNext-powered collaborative workflows located anywhere around the world to access the same archive target. As a result, any user within a StorNext environment can access, browse, and pull files from the shared archive. With this game-changing new capability, a creative-team member working in one city can create content that is automatically stored to the archive and immediately available for further work by team members working elsewhere without its being expressly shipped or explicitly transported to them.
FlexTier Public- and Private-Cloud Access
Quantum will highlight its newly released 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.
Live Multistream 4K Color Correction and Editorial Workflows
In the presentation theater at the booth, Quantum will provide hourly demonstrations of live multistream 4K color 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 performance levels that can be achieved with the optimal hardware configuration, supported by the powerful StorNext platform.