SAN JOSE, CA — Quantum Corp. (www.quantum.com) has announced StorNext 6, a significant new release of its StorNext platform, adding new advanced data management features to the 4K performance of the company's workflow storage solutions portfolio. With the combination of performance and automatic, policy-driven management, StorNext 6 is engineered to overcome the challenges of ever-growing, higher-resolution content and capitalize on the opportunities to re-monetize or re-purpose that content. StorNext 6 features include more efficient and cost-effective ways to meet project performance demands, share and access content across geographically distributed teams and manage and protect archived content. Quantum delivers all these benefits in an integrated, multi-tier storage solution encompassing flash, spinning disk, object storage, tape and the cloud.
The industry's ongoing shift to higher-resolution formats, its use of more cameras to capture footage and its embrace of additional distribution formats and platforms is putting unprecedented pressure on storage infrastructure. For content creators and owners to take full advantage of their content, storage must not only deliver scalable performance and capacity but also ensure that media assets remain readily available to users and workflow applications. According to Quantum, it engineered StorNext 6 to address these requirements and more.
The StorNext platform provides scalable storage that delivers high performance using less hardware than competing systems. With StorNext 6, Quantum delivers a new quality of service (QoS) feature that empowers facilities to further tune and optimize performance across all client workstations, and on a machine-by-machine basis, in a shared storage environment.
Using QoS to specify bandwidth allocation to individual workstations, a facility can guarantee that more demanding tasks, such as 4K playback or color correction, get the bandwidth they need to maintain uncompromising video quality. At the same time, QoS allows the facility to set parameters ensuring that less timely or demanding tasks do not consume an unnecessary amount of bandwidth. As a result, StorNext 6 users can take on work with higher-resolution content and easily optimize their storage resources to accommodate the high-performance demands of such projects.
To address the challenges of global “always on” production workflows, StorNext 6 includes a new feature called FlexSpace which allows multiple instances of StorNext — and geographically distributed teams — located anywhere in the world to share a single archive repository, greatly facilitating collaboration with the same content. Users at different sites can store files in the shared archive, as well as browse and pull data from the repository. Because the movement of content can be fully automated according to policies, all users have access to the content they need without having it expressly shipped to them. Shared archive options include both public cloud storage ― Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud via StorNext's existing FlexTier capability ― and private cloud storage based on Quantum's Lattus object storage or, through FlexTier, third-party object storage such as NetApp StorageGRID, IBM Cleversafe and Scality RING.
FlexSync is a new capability in StorNext 6 that Quantum says 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 recognizes changes instantly and can immediately begin reflecting those changes on another system.
Additional features include Focused Mac Finder Results which allows StorNext Storage Manager to automate archives in an environment with Mac clients, effectively eliminating the lengthy retrieve process previously required to access an archived directory that contains offline files ― which can number in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions.
StorNext 6 will begin shipping with all newly purchased Xcellis and StorNext M-Series offerings, as well as Artico archive appliances, in early summer. It will be available at no additional cost for StorNext 5 users under current support contracts.