August 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
“4K is going to put a strain on storage in terms of more data and higher bandwidth”
he explains. “A lot of the market is moving to 4K production. It’s because they see what is coming on the consumption and TV side. You always want to produce at the highest quality resolution you can. So that is putting signifi cant strain on existing storage infrastructure. One of the Pro solutions we introduced at NAB was the StorNext Pro 4K, a specifi c StorNext confi guration that supports direct 4K production. We’ve sized it and tested it. We know it works today. One of the offerings Quantum has to bring into the market right now is 4K production. That’s not the future — it’s doable today. “We have a lot of customers using it and talking to us about how to move to 4K. A lot of customers have a StorNext environment. They may want to start a separate 4K environment, and because it is all StorNext they can bring it together sometime in the future, and that sounds appealing to customers. 4K is going to put a strain on storage in terms of more data and higher bandwidth. It needs the performance that a StorNext SAN can provide and it needs cost effective storage when you come to archive it. Those are two things that Quantum excels at.”
Workfl ow storage
So what makes StorNext and Quantum stand out? “We’re not a general purpose storage company when it comes to media and entertainment. We’re workfl ow storage. It’s storage optimised for the workfl ows that are used in video and media and entertainment markets. I think of Quantum as being very specialised. “We’re using industry standard hardware, but it’s the combination of that with our software that makes StorNext so special. It is very intelligent, and allows you to accelerate workfl ows in ways that other general purpose storage vendors simply can’t.” Stedman likes the fact that StorNext is a product that “understands media and knows how to optimise workfl ows in ways you can’t get to with other products”.
Customer choice
A recent customer of StorNext is Belgium-based SONUMA (SOciété de NUMérisation et de commercialisation des Archives audiovisuelles), which chose StorNext 5 content workfl ow solutions to help with a large-scale digitisation and digital restoration project. As the owner of RTBF’s TV and radio archives, SONUMA’s mission is to preserve, digitise and monetise these archives, which are currently stored in a wide range of media formats including 16mm fi lm, Beta SP and digital cassette, CD and DAT.
SONUMA will be digitising 8,000 hours of 16mm fi lm, resulting in more than 8PB of content, and needed a high-performance, scale-out storage solution that it could easily deploy in its existing environment. Working with VP Media Solutions, a Quantum reseller, SONUMA purchased a StorNext M441 metadata appliance and StorNext
TVBEurope 53 Interview
StorNext 5 is a re-architected, high-performance scale-out storage and archive platform optimised for customers’ changing workfl ow needs
QX-1200 disk storage to address this need. The DPX 2K fi les resulting from the digitisation process will be ingested directly into StorNext, where digital restoration and transcoding operations will be conducted and the content will be preserved.
“Our archive is a real goldmine, stretching back more than 80 years of radio and nearly 60 years of television,” said Eric Denis, IT manager, SONUMA. “To accomplish the digitisation, the ingest in 2K format and the realtime transcoding of these 8,000 hours of archive, we chose Quantum’s StorNext 5 solution because of its high performance and seamless integration into our content workfl ow.”
Why do customers select Quantum for their storage needs? Stedman explains: “StorNext has enabled productivity or capability that they struggled with before. Customers recognise the workfl ow they are trying to do is diffi cult. StorNext has a level of intelligence about content and the applications and there’s a certain amount of automation in terms of setting policies which translates into automated movement of data or tiering, which can save a lot of time or take out complexity.”
He also believes that customers value the company’s expertise in the media and entertainment sector. “It’s the combination of many years in this market and the talent we have in the company. It has given customers a level of confi dence. We understand their requirements, and we know how to build the technology to handle the uniqueness of media data and the way media needs to be handled. Customers in this market look for expertise and commitment to the media space.”
When asked where Quantum is heading, Stedman says the scale-out storage side of the business is seen as a key growth driver. “It’s an area where we have made signifi cant investments in engineering, particularly with the rewrite of StorNext 5, and we bolstered the team to give us the resources we need to get that done. Enabling cloud workfl ows and enabling our object storage product
are continuing development efforts that are focused on growing that scale-out storage.”
Quantum’s strategy for growth is to focus on the core vertical markets, says Stedman. “We’re not trying to be a general purpose vendor for storage. Our number one market is media and entertainment and we’re going to continue to make that the number one focus.” Stedman fi nds the media and entertainment market exciting because it never stands still. “The industry as a whole is constantly changing and some of that is driven by the consumer technology which changes and demands different forms of content, either higher resolutions for UHD/4K or lower resolutions for watching movies on mobile phones or tablets.
“I’ve been fascinated about how the content business continues to change in terms of what needs to be consumed,
and how it is consumed, which also drives changes in how it is distributed/ packaged. In turn, that drives changes in how it is created. All of that creates amazing opportunities to partner with customers to help them deal with that change and help them ensure they have an infrastructure that gets them there. Partnerships and ecosystems of application vendors are so important because no-one operates as an island in this market.”
Aside from the company’s growth objectives, Stedman hints towards his personal goals and ambitions. “I want to help the company grow. I’m driven by growth. I’m driven by helping companies to solve customer problems. I want to continue to help the company expand on its reputation of being customer friendly and customer focused and to do so in a way that fi nds new ways of growing the business.”
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