1. What are the key priorities for quantum in India?
Quantum India is focused on solving our customers’ challenges in scale-out storage, archive and data protection. To be successful we have plans in place to simultaneously reach as many customers as possible directly and through our authorised channel partners (all sales are via our authorised channel partners). We see a particular opportunity for our newest solutions such as Lattus-Quantum’s object storage solution. Lattus scales to hundreds of petabytes protects against data loss through its durable, self-healing technology. With the amount of growth of data in India Lattus is a perfect fit.
2. What is the broad go to market strategy for the company here?
As noted above, Quantum reaches customers directly and through our authorised channel partners (although all sales are through our authorised channel partners). Our goal is to help illustrate to customers how they can simultaneously improve their storage performance whilst reducing costs. As an example, we offer a service by which we identify data that could be stored on a much less costly tier of storage such as Lattus object storage or even Scalar tape libraries with LTO. More than 50% of data is not modified, let alone accessed for months or years yet it is retained on an organisation’s most expensive tier(s) of storage.
3. How does the company look at the competition in India? What are some of the USPs that can put quantum ahead?
There is always competition. Quantum continues to be a market innovator and leader by offering the best value solutions. In this case, “value” is product performance, open standards, pre-purchase support, installation, integration, post-purchase support, and of course affordability.
4. How many channel partners work with Quantum here in India? and what is the roadmap for channel growth here?
Quantum’s solutions range from SMB to the largest enterprises such as government agencies. As such, we have different types of channel partners focused on different areas of the market. Overall it is approximately 20+ partners. We are always interested in recruiting channel partners who commit to adding value to their customers. Customers win, channel partners win, and of course Quantum wins.
5. What are some of the tech trends that are driving storage business today?
The amount of data creation continues to grow at an incredible pace requiring ever increasing amounts of storage. Customers are increasingly talking to us about their “petabyte” challenges.
Data is being retained longer, sometimes forever. This requires a strategy for minimising costs and ensuring availability.
Overall storage costs are rising when one takes into account all aspects such as hardware, software, real estate, power/cooling, backup. This creates an opportunity to match the value of data with the correct cost of storage.
Storage is becoming ever more strategic. It’s not just about retaining data for audit purposes. It is about monetizing one’s data. Storage, in many organisations, is moving from a cost of doing business to a source of revenue and profit growth.
People expect to have access to their data on a wide-range of platforms.
And finally, customers are starting to think of their storage as a “workflow”. Data is created, ingested, modified/analyzed/utilized, shared, and preserved. Quantum are data workflow experts and we consider it a privilege to learn more about our customers’ workflows and how we can help them optimise their workflows for performance, availability, and cost.
6. How scale-out storage significantly reduces space, power and cooling requirements for your enterprise customers..?
Data has assumed a central role in how companies achieve their core business objectives, creating new demands on IT to save more data and make it available at any point in time. This has led to dramatic shifts in data lifecycles and resulted in unpredictable data workflows. New solutions are therefore required for storing and retaining data— solutions that are flexible enough to support non-linear workflows yet cost-effective to fit within tight IT budgets. Scale-Out enables high-performance capture, collaboration, processing, and preservation of data. Complex workflows require reliable, secure, and proven storage solutions. Quantum’s Scale-Out storage is the intelligent data management system for them.
Quantum’s approach is about aligning data value and storage costs to help you meet your business needs. By applying the right technology at the right point of time in the workflow, we enable our customers to maximize the value of their data while minimizing total cost of ownership. Our tiered storage solutions allow you to store more data, retain it for longer period of time, and keep it accessible for your business users.
StorNext® tape archives provide best-in-class data integrity for long-term data preservation at the lowest possible cost. It provides transparent file system access to all data tiered to tape. The economics of tape just can’t be argued with. StorNext tape archives combine the lowest power and cooling storage with best-of-breed monitoring to reduce the headaches of managing large archives, and to save you time. In fact, StorNext tape archives with iLayer™ software reduce administrative cycles up to 70% compared to other libraries. And with its slot-based pricing, you will enjoy TCO benefits when migrating StorNext AEL Archives to future generations of LTO.
7. Growing crime rates are seeing a high end storage requirement for video footage and in new formats such as 4K and 8K. What are the challenges being faced by video production and post production IT managers & CXO?
Broadcast production has evolved greatly over the past few years and there is no slow down in sight as viewing habits continue to move towards a more mobile society. Video production and Post production IT professionals generally face ever-changing client requirements, tighter deadlines and shrinking budgets. With a complete HD workflow being the norm, one needs a rock-solid performance and reliability in the workflow. Traditional broadcast is no longer driving the needs, and days of “black box” master control is over. The drive for more content delivered in more places and at anytime is overwhelming. The demand for a fully digital HD workflow with multiple camera formats and even greater delivery formats is driving a need for improved efficiency and flexibility in production.
As a post-production professional you face ever-changing client requirements, tighter deadlines and shrinking budgets. With a complete HD workflow being the norm and 4K already here or coming fast, you need rock-solid performance and reliability in your workflow. One of the biggest challenges for content producers is how 4K footage is managed and manipulated in the workflow. Of particular concern is the impact on storage bandwidth and storage capacity requirements. Digital file-based storage offered much more reliable preservation than fragile videotape or film, but up to now had sacrificed image quality. Archiving a 4K master provides assurance that a high-quality original is available when needed. Having a 4K archive also helps ensure the flexibility to create, deliver, and monetize that content for multi-channel delivery and multi-device consumption in formats known today and in those yet to emerge. However, archiving 4K dramatically increases the storage requirements.
Even as storage costs fall, content producers need to take a pragmatic approach to managing their data storage infrastructure throughout the entire content lifecycle. With 4K RAW footage requiring 1366MB/s per stream, maintaining a reliable collaborative production environment is difficult. The content must be compressed to allow existing networks, media workflow solutions, and creative talent to perform efficiently. Shared storage is a must for collaborative workflows, but must be architected in such a way as to provide the bandwidth needed in actual 4K production workflows.
Some of the Quantum’s products are designed from the ground up for media, and forms the ideal foundation for broadcast workflows. StorNext 5 is truly unique, a completely open platform with unmatched collaboration, performance and reliability. From workgroups to full facilities, StorNext 5 delivers provides unmatched workflow efficiency. Built on decades of proven service of StorNext at top broadcasters, StorNext 5 is 10x faster than the previous version, making it the new standard for broadcast production. It drives all production from ingest to delivery with seamless integration of disk and tape archive including Quantum’s next generation object storage – Lattus, to protect critical content and assets.
8. What are some of the new trends to address the demands in geospatial imaging, video surveillance, and seismic research and analysis?
Video recording is increasingly being used by employees and first responders to provide a point-of-view (POV) record of events. The influx of surveillance footage from a growing number of cameras operating at higher resolutions, such as HD, coupled with the desire to increase the retention time of that footage is putting enormous strain on the underlying storage systems used for video surveillance efforts. Legacy storage systems were not designed to scale economically to meet the performance and capacity requirements needed in these environments, resulting in less video content being retained or out-of-budget spending to try and keep up.
Rather than depending on expensive, monolithic storage from legacy vendors to store video surveillance footage, Quantum solves the storage challenge by taking a different approach—one that enables a better workflow with intelligent data management. With a tightly integrated product line that spans high-performance storage capable of ingesting thousands of camera streams, extended online storage for lower-cost video storage and tape libraries for the lowest possible storage cost for long-term retention, Quantum is able to provide a solution that ensures data is stored on the right technology for performance and value. With StorNext 5 managing the entire infrastructure, all data, regardless of where it is stored, is directly available to all users through a single file system interface.
In Geospatial arena, today’s sensors and imagery are all location-based, geospatial coordinates provide the common denominator that GIS applications use to merge different types of data together. And while GIS applications play a central role in raising situational awareness — it turns out that high-performance shared storage is also required to effectively capture, process, share, and preserve imagery and sensor data. Before and after high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery is often critical to the success of emergency management — and accurate assessments of activity on the ground are needed for ISR missions to ensure national security.
Quantum’s StorNext 5 Scale-out Storage is designed for high-performance and collaboration — and leverages the economics of tiered storage so organizations can match the cost of the storage to the access needs of the data, which makes StorNext 5 the right storage infrastructure for today’s complex mission information workflows.