Quantum recently announced advancements to its award-winning StorNext file system and data management software, designed to make cloud content more accessible. The new StorNext will enable hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud use cases, delivering greater flexibility for media and entertainment customers and other data-intensive environments such as genomics, academic research, video surveillance, oil and gas and government security.
Jessica Iler, Product Marketing Manager answers a few questions about the latest feature updates.
PH: Can you talk a bit about what these StorNext updates look like?
Jessica Iler: Quantum’s newest version of its StorNext software – version 6.4 – is designed to make cloud content more accessible, with significantly improved read and write speeds for any cloud and object store-based storage solution.
The new StorNext software features enable hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud storage use cases, delivering greater flexibility for media and entertainment and other data intensive environments such as genomics, academic research, video surveillance, oil and gas and government security.
StorNext 6.4 includes these key features:
- Cloud Content More Accessible Using Self-Describing Objects
- Improved Retrieval Speed from Large Object Stores
- StorNext Dynamic Library Pooling
- Support for AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive Service
PH: How is this software better than the last iteration?
Jessica Iler: Quantum continues to deliver greater efficiencies and simplified management of video and video-like data with its StorNext file system software. With StorNext 6.4, customers can simplify remote work productivity and gain greater efficiencies with their storage environment. StorNext now copies files to the public or private cloud, with the option to include additional object metadata. Non-StorNext clients and cloud-resident processes may now access objects directly, leveraging the new extended metadata. This allows querying for files without going through StorNext.
StorNext 6.4 is the most recent release, providing features aligned with today’s world and customer requirements Working closely with our customers, we continue to innovate and enhance the capabilities of our StorNext file system.
PH: Describe hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud use cases. How does this allow for more flexibility?
Jessica Iler: With the rapidly evolving challenges that face our customers today, the need to move content more easily and flexibly has become a requirement. The Media and Entertainment industry is using cloud for their remote collaboration workflows and looks to StorNext to facilitate content movement to and from the cloud in this new schema. This latest version of StorNext 6.4 software adds new ways to archive content and access it in the cloud, providing this content movement between different locations including on-prem and even cloud datacenters. This capability allows StorNext 6.4 software features to extend enablement of hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud storage use cases, delivering greater flexibility for media and entertainment.
With the newly added functionality of Self-Describing Objects making cloud content more easily accessible, StorNext 6.4 can be therefore instrumental to enable new hybrid-cloud workflows.
PH: What features are you most excited about?
Jessica Iler: We are excited about all the new features and benefits StorNext 6.4 offers to our customers, which collectively help our customers more efficiently operate in today’s more remote oriented workflows and environments. As part of our strategy to bridge on-prem storage and the cloud, the support for Self-Describing Objects in StorNext 6.4 now makes cloud content more easily accessible. This advancement underscores our commitment to enable customers to more easily manage and access their content and maintain production in remote environments.
PH: How have you already seen StorNext in action?
Jessica Iler: StorNext has been integrated and used for many years by leading worldwide customers in many industries with a strong presence in the Media and Entertainment industry as well as with Government, Manufacturing, Genomics, video surveillance and other data intensive environments. Due to recent events and global response of making work from home the new norm, our Media and Entertainment customers have had to adjust workflows accordingly. These changes now necessitate remote collaboration and media production, which frequently is including use of the cloud in these new workflows. With the recent release of StorNext 6.4, these customers can now more easily access content in the cloud, to streamline their workflows and monetize content more rapidly.
PH: What else would you like to share?
Jessica Iler: With the release of StorNext 6.4, Quantum continues to advance its software-defined product portfolio strategy and extend Quantum’s leadership in managing video and other unstructured data. This release is a step that is part of a broader journey – where we are headed is about giving customers a seamless bridge between on-prem and cloud infrastructures.