Earlier today at IBC in Amsterdam, Quantum announced StorNext 5 Appliances, a new generation for StorNext that delivers dramatic new levels of performance, scalability and flexibility for the industry’s leading file system, tiered storage and archive. Newly engineered from the ground up, StorNext 5 is the result of over two years of development with our team of file system experts—many from the original StorNext team— examining virtually every line of code with the thought: “How can we optimize StorNext for our customers modern, evolving workflows?”
In the past two decades of managing digital content for the world’s most demanding workflows, including the world’s top post and broadcast facilities, the digital workflow has changed. Video, image and sensor data are now 100% digital, from capture to ingest to processing to delivery to archive. Production teams are now globally distributed and need immediate, shared access to collaborate effectively. Digital content is now more than just large streaming video files, it’s a mix of files of various sized that must be managed together, efficiently. And the network topologies and interconnect that users and applications use to access content have evolved beyond the SAN to include IP/NAS and even cloud access.
The result is StorNext 5, a complete end-to-end solution that combines best-of-breed file system technology with easy-to-deploy appliances to support today’s complex and demanding digital workflows. Existing and new Quantum customers that support media workflows, such as those we’re talking to at IBC this week, will benefit from StorNext 5 in a number of ways:
Scalability: StorNext 5 supports up to 5 Billion files in a single file system.
Media customers with large-scale content repositories can now scale to 5 billion files in a single StorNext 5 system. That sounds like a lot, but digital repositories that store media in single-file-per-frame formats like DPX or generate large numbers of files such as VFX are growing by leaps and bounds with each new project.
Performance: StorNext 5 offers up to 10x the file system performance.
Modern media workflows rely more heavily on transcoding and proxy generation which spread large numbers of small files across many render nodes or transcode farms. The up to 10x speed in creating and deleting files in StorNext 5 and 100% increase in small file performance can significantly accelerate the transcoding and rendering process for faster project completion.
Flexibility: StorNext 5 supports SAN-free content access.
Media workflows that support proxy-based editing, rendering and transcoding operations will also benefit from StorNext 5 network efficiency over IP as they are more likely to be NAS, rather than SAN connected. At the same time, other users and applications can continue to share the same content though the SAN for blinding-fast access performance, even at 4K and beyond.
Choice: StorNext 5 offers choice of LTFS or Quantum ANTF for tape archive.
Native LTFS support in StorNext 5 allows production facilities to more easily collaborate with partners, deliver content, and archive long-term on a standard tape format that can be read outside a StorNext environment. At the same time, customers can continue to use Quantum ANTF, which offers higher performance and can archive files that are too large to fit on a single tape.
This is just the start. There’s much more we’re excited to tell you about our new StorNext 5 Appliances. As they say in broadcasting, stay tuned for more after the show.
To find out more about StorNext 5 and StorNext Pro Solutions, visit the Quantum team at IBC in Amsterdam for 1-on-1 demos. Check out www.stornext.com/ibc for more.