Speaker 0 00:02 Welcome to the workflow show. This is episode three Oh one the beginning of our third year and third season today I, Nick gold and my colleague Jason Whetstone of Chesapeake systems are joined by two people we've known for many years. This is visitations from quantum episode quantum, the quantum reality here at the workflow show and Chesapeake systems. We are joined by Alex Grossman and skip Blevins. We have a storied history with these two. We've known them for quite a while, done lots with them over the years and in multiple incarnations. And, and guys, you know, to be honest, I can't even really remember your job titles at a given moment. Maybe you can just start off by telling us what your current roles at quantum are. I almost think of you as an inseparable duo. Right? Alex, let's start with you. What, what do you do these days at quantum?
Speaker 1 01:01 Sounds good. Nick and Nick and Jason. Uh, great to be here with you guys and always, always a pleasure. So currently at quantum I manage the media and entertainment business. So essentially a product go to market. Um, all the information about satisfying our customers, ensuring that we have the right products, the right strategies for support and service, and just generally understanding the needs of the media and entertainment customers. And that covers both post and broadcast and a lot of the sub vertical markets such as, you know, sports and a lot of the news and other publication pieces that we work with. So the media grand Poobah in other words. Yeah. Well that's, that's a good way to put it. I like that. But, uh, I would say just someone who has been around the business for awhile and understands it to a certain extent and, and skip, what's your title currently at quantum.
Speaker 2 02:00 So, uh, so thanks for having us on. And, uh, and I got to say congratulations on embarking on your third year of the workflow show. Yeah, thank you. In 60 years I'll be like hitting myself, you know, let me think. Well, w w then we'll get to do the roast for you guys and that will be a lot of fun. We almost make it too easy to roast us, but, uh, yeah. Uh, skip Blevins. And I drive what's called a technical marketing for StorNext at quantum. Uh, and I am a minor minion on Alex's grand Poobah team there right now. But the reality is, I mean, you know, given our background and what we've done and, um, I pretty much love to get involved in almost anything related to StorNext and how people are using it. And you know, whether there's customers and let's say federal or life sciences, uh, or meeting entertainment of course, how they use tools like store next to do collaboratively, something that they couldn't do any other way. So that's, that's, that's the heart of it. And that's what I love to do.
Speaker 0 03:01 Tell us how you guys got into this, uh, this whole sort of media. It kind of, uh, you know, space.
Speaker 1 03:09 Wow. Where to, where do we start there? I guess for myself, it really started, uh, I've been a storage guy for a lot of years and, uh, I was initially in a what, what? Oh God, what did we call this now? We used to call it publishing, but I don't even know what it's called anymore. Um, nothing is, nothing is in the printed page anymore. But yeah, I, I started in the printing industry and, um, of course I was very excited, you know, having a, I was electrical engineer, that was what I was degreed in and, uh, a minor in CS. And I thought, well, this is a really interesting market, this publishing thing, it's just happening so fast. This desktop publishing thing that was happening was changing the world. And I realized that, guess what, you know, things like Photoshop are gonna increase the amount of storage that people use. So, Hey, maybe I should start working on storage. And that was a, that was in the eighties, if you can believe that. And when people have big hair and, uh, incredible dress. Um, but that really got me into the business.
Speaker 0 04:09 Nice. Cool. And what about you, skip, what about the, the early days of your, your entree into this space that you've been regretting ever since?
Speaker 2 04:17 Well, you know, I gotta say I was a, I was a marketeer and a brander, but we bought these magical black Unix workstations, um, from a little company called next. Yup. And at one point, the company I was working for was the largest customer of next workstations. And I gotta tell you, I completely fell in love with, uh, with next step and object oriented programming and web objects. I, it just clearly to me that was the future. And from there I, I leaped to Apple to go drive, believe it or not in maca was eight dot. Six days. How they went and built web apps and served web apps on Mac eight. Dot. Six six.
Speaker 0 04:56 I still argue that eight six is the best Prius 10 operating system. Those guys ever had rock solid. Oh yeah. I went to college. I remember anybody who was kind of a geeky, you know, professor or even some of the, you know, guys that worked at the college, they all had three boxes in front of them. There was always a windows box, a Mac and a next. So, yeah, it's definitely, they were the one college that had an excellent, no, no, it was a very, and for our listeners who don't know this, I mean you ought to if you're a geek listening to this program, but next of course was the company that Steve jobs, uh, ran after he was kicked out of Apple the first time and then started and they developed this wonderful Unix, uh, you know, BA BSD with a mock kernel operating system that at the time was known as next step that became OpenStep when they ran it on, on multiple processor platforms.
Speaker 0 05:50 That Apple then bought through next when they also absorbed Steve jobs back into the mixes. I CEO for a and it became the OSTP 10 operating system that we, we love and use and worship today. And I have to say, I recently built an a windows box to play with, with my new Oculus rift virtual reality headset. And it's been cool, but I have to say, gosh, Mac S really is the best from, from a client perspective. And speaking of Apple, I mean I think that's where Chesapeake's you know, the original relationship with both of you guys in some ways was, was formed when we were one of the, I'd say leading edge Apple video VARs, you know, 10 years ago even, you know, maybe you can tell us both about your, your activities there. It's obviously a, an exciting company, a sexy company. We all have our new iPhone six is, or at least I do that, that we love and Porsche. Yeah, it was a little bit of a, an ordeal getting it, but you know, it was worth it. I definitely put you in the early adopter camp. I think it's more of a fan boy, but you know, it's, it's both of those things. They're both true, so so, exactly. Alex, why don't you start off, I mean we met you when you were doing a lot with the servers and raid group at Apple. Can you tell us a little bit more about that time there and what you were, you were trying to build there?
Speaker 1 07:16 Sure. It's kind of an interesting time. And it's an interesting story because it's really relevant to where, where things are today. I mean, I was, I was a, a huge fan of, of Apple for a long time. And don't get me wrong, I, I ran a, uh, Iran, uh, uh, group at a former company that basically did everything for windows and for Linux and for Unix. And then, but I always use the Mac and I love the Mac and, and it was one of my first computers. And like you, you know, I probably had a shirt that said I love mostly finder or something and in the good old days, but I, I went to, um, I knew everybody at Apple because of the company that I was, was managing at the time called Micronet technology. We were a big OEM to Apple. We did about 25% of their storage.
Speaker 1 08:03 And so we were one of the largest storage vendors they had. And I had a, I had a little, uh, conversation with, uh, with mr jobs. And, uh, and of course Phil Schiller and John Rubinstein at the time were talking about Apple and storage and they said, Hey, you know, Apple's an interesting company but we don't have a storage practice and we used to do servers and we don't do servers anymore. How'd you like to come over here and start that up? And I thought, wow, you know, Apple is this big company and I can go ahead and start a storage practice, bring a great team in and do something incredible. And that's how we got started. And from there it was interesting because in my former life before that I was working with what we had called desktop video with companies like media 100 and radius with video vision.
Speaker 1 08:52 And Apple had just acquired what became final cut pro. And so we had the opportunity to not only just do the server and storage business around, as skip said, there was a lot of things to do even today, federal and life sciences and many places that Apple was incredibly successful, including universities, but also in video, in video production and all the way from, from post to broadcast. And really working with the final cut team to bring server storage and of course this great file system that we call Exxon, the collaborative engine that put it all together. And I was privileged enough to work with a fantastic team and to be able to build those, those products and really drive it in the image of what we wanted to see going forward and working with some of the smartest people in the industry. I did that for about seven and a half years and it was a great run. We did a lot of great things away. And of course that's where I met skip.
Speaker 0 09:48 Yeah. And so skip, what role were you in over there? I mean, it's an interesting background.
Speaker 2 09:53 Yeah. So I got to tell you, so I was on the developer relations team at Apple and I was brought in on the excerpt launch and immediately just had this vision of the future and just how far that Apple could take servers and storage and how that could help support the pro apps ecosystem. And I was absolutely sold. I, uh, I, I lobbied internally and became the technology evangelist for servers and storage and OSTP 10 server, which meant that I got to, I mean for me it was absolute tech heaven because I could work on great teams that Alex was putting together. Um, uh, uh, I don't think we can describe it in any detail, but Apple does something pretty magical called the Apple new product process. And it's this wonderful collaborative way to recruit kind of the best of the best around the entire company and go build and go build products in ways that, uh, you know, obviously result in groundbreaking products.
Speaker 2 10:54 And, uh, so I got a chance to see that up close and be on the teams that Alex was putting together. And it really felt like it was moving history. It was doing, Apple had always had servers. It's just that, you know, it was a, it was a, uh, Mac <inaudible>, a tower called a server. And, um, uh, it kind of as an object lesson, I, I, I saved an old Shiner tower from recycling and stuck it in my office because that was what Apple used to call the server that was actually running Apple UX back in the day. So, uh, so to me it was a chance to write history and the kinds of things that Apple was doing in servers and storage and in support of the pro apps was just completely groundbreaking to me. And, and, and, and so that's how I got involved and got to be a part of,
Speaker 0 11:42 And this is where I met you when, when Apple was evangelizing this platform very heavily, they did these events for us reseller partners called rock and roll. And I think this is the first time I out in Cupertino at Apple HQ and met you guys and was just very impressed by the vision. And interestingly, in the same kind of stretch of time that I think you guys were, were involved with that team really aimed at the rack of the customer space right there. There was this other set of developments happening at Apple that were very focused on what was going on inside of people's pockets and what platform they might be sitting, you know, on their lap or in front of them on their desk. And from an outside perspective, uh, both as a consumer and as a an Apple partner, it seems to me that the weight of Apple's interests in that time period very much started to gravitate towards that, that client end experience and less of that server side. Uh, is there anything you can speak to kind of then as a segue about, you know, your next, you know, big push with, with the server and storage space, um, which was again our next level of engagement with you at active, just about what was going on at Apple at that time. Then kind of your Genesis into active storage.
Speaker 1 13:02 Well, you know, it's an interesting point in history there Nick and it, it, it really brings into what the power of, if you want to call it the it piece of the business was, so we were the experts in what we'll call this server and storage or it business that Apple and Apple had a um, you know, had their own internal it and let's face it, they were running a multibillion dollar company and there were things like Oracle and SAP and all these great things. But when it came time to have to serve out audio and video and to have it in a collaborative manner, and actually remember when the quote unquote iTunes music store came out, there wasn't a formula for people actually take all these, these pieces of media coming in on tape and physical. They were coming in on CDs from a lot of the vendors and there was no standard.
Speaker 1 13:57 A studio would have a movie in this format or in that format. Who knows what Kodak, it was stored in if it was digital, but most of the time it was on tape. A lot of the audio was coming in it up, you know, and we had to figure out how to actually build a system that could accommodate what we thought would be hundreds of thousands of downloads, which became billions of downloads. And we got right in the middle of that. And, and that's one of the reasons why we got a lot of attention with an Apple because as you say, there was a serious shift going on to helping the consumer. And I think, um, Steve jobs made a statement at one of the keynotes where he said, Apple is a mobile company. And in a lot, a lot of people who were doing the Mac pro at the time got a little scared and all of a server and storage people were thinking, what does this mean?
Speaker 1 14:49 But we had a lot of attention. The one thing we could see is we could see while Apple wasn't going to abandon the market, we saw that we were going to tail off. And what, what we saw is that we weren't gonna go after the market as hard as we'd done for the first five years. So just to give you a little background on this that's kind of interesting is that there were many, many server and storage companies that were established for many, many years and they were doing really well. And Apple became, for a period of time, the fourth largest storage vendor in the world there were large as in us. And we had come from zero that in three years. And so we really had a lot going on. But the opportunity loss piece was where does Apple spend the money? And so we wanted to take it to the next level.
Speaker 1 15:37 We want it to evolve beyond that. And we saw some changes that were happening in the industry and what we saw as we saw that the Apple ease of use, the whole ease of everything was becoming more important. And it was not only on the consumer side, but also on the server and storage side. You guys know that before the extra rate, you know, you, you had a, you had a, have a degree to basically get a, uh, a rate system up and running and manage it remotely with crazy tools and nothing was integrated. And so we, we fixed that at Apple, but we could only do it to a certain extent. And we had our hands tied as to where we could go because you had to live up to a certain Apple standard, which meant that you, um, you know, you had to work on, and I hate to say it this way, but it's true.
Speaker 1 16:28 You had to work on the idea that you, you couldn't move faster than some of your brother in another areas. So your cadence was a slower cadence. So we decided, a few of us who had been at Apple and a few of us who had been at, at the company before I was at Apple, we all got together and we decided we're going to spin ourselves out and do a little venture called active storage. And we really, um, you know, Steve jobs used to say, you know, would you like to put a dent in the universe and we put a little dent in the universe. So we focus particularly on the idea that we were going to take storage for media and entertainment storage for the creative side of the house to create a professional to the next level. And we uh, we went out and we, you know, we got that patent portfolio up very large.
Speaker 1 17:16 And of course the first thing we did is we, we OEM StorNext from quantum. And the reason we did that is we fell, it was absolutely the best collaborative sharing engine on the planet. And we knew it pretty well because of our ties with Exxon. And we decided that we could change the way StorNext was used and we optimize performance around it. We build things like active sand and that was also, you know, a five and a half year. Great run at being able to change the world a little bit. Well, very few organizations at all who made technology
Speaker 0 17:50 For anything even approaching again the rack or the it side of the shop. I think ever really even thought what is the user experience of this platform for the people administrating it, right? It's like skip. Tell us about what went into that thinking. Like why was that important? Especially why was that important in the media entertainment broadcast space, that creative side of the it shop?
Speaker 2 18:15 Well, so this is really interesting and I think active storage was really an answer to the question that that you often have when you're starting a company and which is how far can I take this? So you know, you know, what do you stand for and, and what do we want to do? And as Alex said, it was really to make a dent in the universe. And for me it's always been about what people do with the tools you create. If you create great tools, what else can customers do with it? And it was really, if anything kind of, you know, some people might challenge the notion that you would make storage that you could set up in four clicks with with software tool that automatically discovers its environment and automatically makes good decisions or good default decisions. Um, and people thought, well, gee, you're taking away from the integrators and you know, the integrators want to show that value to the customer.
Speaker 2 19:06 And we took the complete opposite stance. We said if you make tools that are intuitive and easy to use and you know, make smart decisions and use intelligent defaults that, that the, the, the, the chore of installing those for those creative professionals becomes a very small part of their business and you can then focus on what else you provide to the customer. Being consultative and helping them realize their vision. And Chesapeake really got that. I needed that. That's why it was so much fun working with you guys is because you saw that vision and you responded to it and that was, that was what made it so exciting.
Speaker 0 19:41 Yeah. I mean, you know, as much as we can all geek out on storage at the end of the day, no matter what's going on in that rack, you know, it's a hard drive icon on your desktop. Right? I mean, it's not exactly the sexiest thing in the universe. It shouldn't be anyway. Exactly. And you shouldn't have to dwell on that,
Speaker 1 19:59 Right? The theory is it should just go away. It should be completely seamless and invisible and that that was the whole idea. Make hard technology easy. And that's, that was, that was the goal. And you know, I don't think anyone's gotten to that level since active, although I would say that, you know, we've been doing some things that at quantum that are just pretty cool. Cool. Um, so we started off this whole discussion talking about, um, how, how you guys are really a part of the meeting entertainment part of quantum and why, why should there even be a media and entertainment part of quantum? And I'm like, what, what are the, uh, you know, what are some of the unique challenges that, that, that, that we face in that space? I think that's a really interesting question, Jason, because I think where where we see it and where it's always been is that, you know, we like to say that storage is horizontal and we like to say that anything you do in a work group, anything you actually, you actually have done where you're doing collaboration, it tends to be a horizontal thing.
Speaker 1 21:04 We all collaborate every day on email. You know, we do it on Skype, we, we talk quite a bit. We do it in chat and we share files and we share photos and we have a lot of tools to do this. But ultimately when you're working with very large files, streaming files under heavy deadlines, the horizontal tools that people use, these storage devices that people have, they just fall down in media and entertainment. And people say to me all the time, how could that be? How can a big large, you know, three letter company not be able to do what you could do in your, in your smaller company and you're much more focused company. How can you do it better than they can? And the answer is that the really, and this is why there is a media entertainment practice, is that we're looking at different things.
Speaker 1 21:54 So you know, you, you guys know this, but I'll obviously a lot of your audience probably does. And is that when you look at the way we deliver storage, the way we deliver performance, it's different when you're in a enterprise environment working with a mail server and trying to help an ATM machine work versus what you do in media entertainment. And it comes down to these two terms. One called I ops and the other called throughput. And I would, I would add latency in there. And so there's really a different type of system required in a different, a different type of performance specification required in order to be good at media and entertainment. And, and while we all know in the business there are heavy demands and deadlines, sometimes you just can't do it over. And that's really what the, uh, you know what the difference is, you have to capture it correctly, you have to get it done in post and you have to get it out there. And it's a fairly complex business and it's exciting. And probably the reason I'm so excited about it still after many years is that it's constantly evolving. And, uh, evolution, believe it or not should make it easier, but it actually makes it harder. It makes it more complex. I were in media entertainment,
Speaker 2 23:14 So, so, you know, in thinking back to, uh, Exxon and, and how it was really kind of mind blowing, how easy it was for two people to see and share the same storage, that was a huge step forward. But, and as wonderful as Exxon is, it feels like the pace of change and the demands being placed on, on content creatives has gone up exponentially. And the pace of change has quickened so much that you have to have a really deep technology tool chest to draw on to try and meet these challenges. I mean, things that were just never conceived of, uh, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. Um, you know, almost every creative team now has to not only create packages for TV or movie, they are evolving into these constant production factories that have to produce assets in different flavors for, you know, some of our customers, 40 different platforms.
Speaker 3 24:13 And, uh, you know, even in this, this space, this media entertainment space, you have, um, you know, a lot of different types of workflows. You have like a news workflow and you have a sports workflow and you have a, you know, a post production workflow. Um, so that's, you know, that's definitely challenging file sizes. You know, you're, you're, you're talking to the media and entertainment space, you know, single files can be gigabytes, sometimes terabytes. It's, you know, it's really, it's really something. And, um, you know, you mentioned about how the, you know, the pace of change, we're starting to talk about four K, five K workflows. Now. Everything's just getting bigger, you know, as, as we're like, you know, as consumers crave like higher quality and they're, you know, they're asking for this.
Speaker 1 24:53 I know it's really funny because the, the complexity and the change is all driven by consumer demand. So you know, we talk about, we talk about our life at Apple and in some ways Apple's professional business was hurt by the consumer business or at least a lot of people have that perception. But in reality, you know, I tunes changed the way people's delivery would be forever. And even, even though early on they didn't do a lot of streaming and you could say Netflix, maybe a couple others really drove streaming Hulu and others really the way you delivered content, the number of different formats you delivered and who delivered the content really has been changing. So it's not just, when we say media entertainment, it's a little bit of a misnomer because it's not just professional organizations that do sports and news and their posts, facilities and broadcast facilities.
Speaker 1 25:47 But a lot of this is still a corporate America doing this, you know, corporate video around the world, enterprise level companies getting into this ad agencies. I mean today we're just inundated by the amount of content that people are demanding anywhere, anytime, you know, on any device at the highest possible quality there is. I mean, what was I seeing the other day? Was it Kendall said that we're twice the resolution of HD and then Samsung came out and said, Oh no, all our displays on our new device is going forward or 4k. I mean, really, do I really need 4k on a cell phone? I, I'm not sure, but ultimately it's going to drive these workflows where we're going to, um, put a higher demand on the way we deliver and how fast we deliver, which is really crazy.
Speaker 3 26:37 Yeah. And what's happened is that, you know, video was, you know, because of the cost of producing it, the cost of these
Speaker 0 26:44 Storage systems at a time when they would, when there were millions of dollars to put in a sand versus, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. There was only a few, an elite that could produce it. And it was a one to many type operation where it was a mass communications medium. And I think that evolution that you were just describing is that it's become a communications medium for everyone. I say it's, it's become the language of the internet. The universal language of the internet is video. Now. You, you, if something doesn't seem right, if it's lacking video, you don't go to any websites anymore that don't have video as a pretty integral part of it. Even if you're a startup with your Kickstarter, what, what, what has fueled so many, you know, Kickstarters for these things that are just ideas. Frankly in someone's head, they've had a really snappy video that makes it seem really compelling.
Speaker 0 27:34 And so that power really is in everyone's hands now. So with all that said, that changing landscape that the higher demands and yet the ability for more and more people to participate in, in telling those stories through that medium, whether they're a traditional broadcast or media operation, or a corporate entity or a nonprofit utilizing video to tell their story, how specifically is quantum now responding? Right? You're in this new space, you're in quantum, which became your home, the, the source of the intellectual property of, of StorNext. Um, you know, that was seemed a very logical transition for you guys and a number of your colleagues that were part of active's organization to land when that organization ceased to exist and you now have this large entity, this corporate entity that has a lot of resources behind it. Um, you know, what is quantum now doing in the face of this, this rapidly changing landscape as far as the product line developments, just ongoing activities, the way you're wrapping things into packages, you know, maybe you can spend a few minutes, you know, just clarifying for the viewers, you know, what they can look to in quantum to see that quantum as a partner to work with, to respond to this, this world we're now inhabiting.
Speaker 2 28:51 That's a, that's a big question. And, and, and I would preface, I would preface any answer by saying that the heart of it is still StorNext the, and it really is. I mean, I mean, I, I have fun reminding people that letting people work on the same problem, the same storage at the same time as one of the hardest computer problems there is. And Stuart X does it and has done it elegantly for a long time. And, and it allows you, as opposed to a NAS, it allows you to use to unique needs to address the unique needs of video customers where you've got very, very, very large files that are very sensitive to any kind of latency. They don't take well to packetize and et cetera. That's, that's always been the strong point for StorNext. And one of the major initiatives, uh, that quantum, um, recently completed was a complete, um, uh, you know, call it a retooling a rearchitecting, um, uh, of StorNext itself. So every component of the store, next file system got to major overhaul and tune up and all with an eye towards modernization and making it ready for whatever the future brings.
Speaker 0 30:03 So that's StorNext five, maybe you guys can go into a few of the Keller bullet points that, that, that makes it exciting and, and you know, maybe relate that in a way that might be exciting to the end users, right? Because me as a guy who's been very involved with storage for many years, it's like when I started to see the bullet points and the presentation from the always very engaging Alex Grossman about its feature set. I'm like smiling like a little kid, right? I'm like, Oh, it's Christmas and whenever. Right. But you know, what does that manifest as? So maybe you guys can can go into some of those details and like what does it mean for that user in that challenging environment? What is StorNext five doing that's unique.
Speaker 1 30:42 Yeah. It's interesting, Nick, you mentioned that because you know, we get all excited to write the star next five is, is essentially a wishlist that, you know, skip and I and others, especially people within quantum put together over a number of years. And we started, you know that wishlist pack it Apple. So yeah, it's, it's a wishlist of things that are just modernizing it because as much as we talk about this, as much skip as skip relates, how things are changing, things are still the same. And, and the same means that people want a piece of software they want store next just to get out of the way. They just want it. They just want things to work. Like you say, at the end of the day, it's an icon. It's an icon on your desktop. And ultimately you just want to click on it and see all your content.
Speaker 1 31:31 But in the world of me of media professionals today, they don't usually do that. You know? So we're, we're Mac people, we think of the finder, you know, go to the finder and find your content. Really it's all about, and this the number one bullet point of StorNext five is the connectivity to the ecosystem. And that's really the key to me. So when we, when I say ecosystem, I mean all those partners that build all the applications that we use every day. So you know, whether it's final cut pro 10 or whether it's a Adobe premier and the whole creative suite and especially Adobe anywhere or even whether it's media composer and using, using tools like sand fusion, we can add that right onto StorNext five. And so working with a lot of third party companies to build out this ecosystem where everything feels seamless at a level of performance where you don't know the content or that data is not on your computer.
Speaker 1 32:31 And that's what StorNext five really brings. So the way to look at it as in a modern world, we took StorNext five, we made it understand that there were multi-process architectures, there were, there were multiple threads that we could do. There was a lot of memory. We could make the performance faster and better. But ultimately to the user, it just feels like it's always there and always reliable. And skip talked about this, you know, there's been this war of San and NAS, if no one knows what that is. Essentially it's just the, you know, different way that you hook it up and the NAS guys get faster and they catch up and then, you know, the resolutions get bigger and the files get bigger and the NAS guys slowed down. And ultimately the sand guys where we're StorNext mainly plays, you know, the idea that you're just connected all, all at once.
Speaker 1 33:20 This performance level just continues to increase. And what <inaudible> really does is it just makes working with large media, whether in today it's audio or video or any type of video and whether you're doing, you know, technologies like transcoding to change formats or using proxies or working raw, the thing that store next five does is just makes it all feel natural. So there's no slowdowns in performance when you, uh, when you click on that quote unquote finder and want your content and want to play it, it's there. When you want to record it, it's there. So all the way from ingest to play out, it's just fast and easy. And the key to me is you don't work like that anymore today. Your work either in the application or you work with a media asset manager and he has to have an inherent knowledge of where the content lives on the network. And the network may not even be in your building. The network might be in the cloud or it might be in another facility where you're connected. And what StorNext five it does is it gives you the ability to have a more worldwide view of where your content and where your assets will be and also to make those content and assets available with no slowdown in performance. That's really the beauty of, that's great. All the hot technical stuff, but that's the beauty. Right.
Speaker 3 34:41 Well tell us, um, tell us a little bit about storage manager now. Um, you know, we, we talk about storage manager a lot. What exactly is storage manager?
Speaker 1 34:48 Well this is, that's it. That's a great one. Let me jump in, skip real quick on that one because I think, I think storage manager is a little, is mainly misunderstood and it's for the reason that people, it's been around for a long time and now it's finally really valuable. What do I mean by that? What storage manager is, is a policy based engine that allows you to control where your content lives at any given time. So let me say that one of the big evolutions that's happened in the media industry is what I like to call re monetization. So people have content, you know, this is the way it works, right? You take your assets, you build it into content, you deliver that content, the show's done, you wash your hands of it and it goes away, right? No, it doesn't because let's face it, it used to be like that when things went to air and you watched that TV show and you had to be home on time to make sure that eight o'clock at night, you're in prime time, your TV show is there.
Speaker 1 35:45 And then came the DVR where you could actually record it in case you weren't there. And now you have these things called on demand. And so now you can watch it on demand and you watch a television show, you know, and it runs for seven years and it goes off the air. And what happens? Well, people want to watch it again. I mean, I'll use breaking bad is my great example. There are more people, and this was, I just stole this off, uh, off the internet. There were more people discovering breaking bad now because it's been such an award winner than watched it initially. And so, you know, pulling that content back, where is it? Well, you know, seven or so seasons of breaking bad, I can't keep that all in my primary main online disc. It had to go off to somewhere to be saved.
Speaker 1 36:27 And you know, in the old days we didn't save it. Right? What do we do nickel tell you. We used to take the hard drives, unplug them, put them on the shelf or you know, write it out to videotape and hope it was there in five or six years. And now what we do is we realize there were different stages of storage. There's this online stage, there's an extended online where I may want to keep it for five or 10 years. And then there's this deep archive where I probably want to put it on something more resilient, an object storage, which you know, that's another technology or tape and I want it a little bit. Yeah. And the beauty. The beauty of that is that the idea that you can actually use storage managers set those policies to say, and storage manager also works with other tools like media asset managers and production workflow manager.
Speaker 1 37:15 We can actually say, Hey, I'm done with the show. I want to save it for a longer period of time, move it off my expensive online storage onto a less expensive storage and one that may be more resilient. And Hey, by the way, make a copy of it and put it on tape so I can take it off site. You know, the quote unquote salt mine, get it out of the way. So God forbid there's an earthquake, you know, California guy talking, right? There's an earthquake or um, or a flood or anything else that could happen that would be a disaster, a fire, God forbid, something like that. You want to be able to maintain that. And we all know in this business because the data was so big, people didn't follow those good practice. There's a many movies and television shows right now that the quality is just so poor because they didn't have the originals to go back to and we could point to them or the big fire at universal where some of those great shows have been lost forever.
Speaker 1 38:11 And uh, we, you know, we want to maintain that it's a storage manager has come around because the need has come around for it. And the beauty is it's seamless and store knacks relatively easy to set up concerning how, how difficult it is. And it's just something that's well supported by the whole ecosystem. So if you were, if I was mentioning this ecosystem of third party vendors, if they work with StorNext, they instantly get connectivity, storage manager and other quantum tools. That is the beauty of having what we like to call an end to end workflow.
Speaker 3 38:43 So Alex, it sure does. It really does. It was so, so just give me a really brief, like how does this all work? So storage manager, like what I'm picturing is, you know, you, you get done with something and you know, you have, um, you know, maybe your volume may, which is a really expensive high speed storage, you know, with all the space. And then you have your volume be over here and that's like your, you know, slower disk or whatever is storage manager. Just kind of move in that file. And then if I check tomorrow, it's not going to be there anymore.
Speaker 1 39:09 It's actually magic. The guy from Chesapeake just comes in, sets it up and it just all works really to the end user. What does it end? What does it end up looking like to the end user? You can set policies and, and there's two ways to really do this. One is you can use storage, uh, storage manager native, and you can say, um, and, and there's these things called affinities and star, next five that are the coolest things in the world. If you want to geek out and throw the sort of, the really spinny hat on. But without that, the key is really like this. So if I know that I'm finished with a show, uh, I'm finished with any of my content, I can tell storage manager, here's what I want to do. I want to move it off this piece of storage, move it to this piece of storage and move it to tape.
Speaker 1 39:53 The end user will happen overnight. It'll happen when there's free time. It'll happen when there's no load on the system and it can all be adjusted and for the user, they'll just see it move away, but it'll leave. It'll leave an indicator. We call a stubs so that they can get, if they want to get it back, they can, you know, they can click on it and it will bring it back from either tape or other discs so that they can use it. In fact, depending on what the other disc is, the extended on like this, it may be instantly available or it may take some time. For instance, if it's moved out to tape, it'll say you have to load this tape in order to get it back. If the tape is sitting at a tape library where there's a robot and not one of those scary ones, but a robot that moves the tape back in, it'll just automatically bring it in as it's required.
Speaker 1 40:38 And a lot of times in the media world, especially, people use these things called media asset managers. They, they see all these pieces as assets and they manage them. And so to the user, they may not even go into the finder. They may go to the job area and say, I want this job. And again, the beauty of this too is as our resolutions go up and, and the, the needs go up in the more people who were actually collaborating on this content, your online storage costs go way up. Cause now as you say, these files can be terabyte files and if you have a hundred of them, you need a hundred terabytes online. And the thing we like, the thing we like as an integrator and uh, you know,
Speaker 3 41:24 We actually do know the answer to a lot of these questions. Jason here is being a little leading, right? Um, you know, we love the fact that we love the fact
Speaker 0 41:34 That, you know, things like storage manager have their own set of APIs, right? So to our listeners, these are called app application programming interfaces, but think of them as hooks into the backend of the software that an integrator like ourselves can leverage in order to kind of create back channel communication, if you will, between various pieces of say, enterprise class software. And so, you know, when we work with media asset management systems, you know, they have these two identities, right? A database essentially for a searchability of the content and tagging with metadata and all of those types of things. But then they also serve as these automation and workflow engines. And so one of the things that's really cool about storage manager is that it gives us these API APIs that we can hook a media asset manager right into. So these two pieces of software, the ma'am and the engine that's driving the flow of files across multiple tiers of storage, they're all in constant intrinsic communication with one another.
Speaker 0 42:36 Essentially you've taken two systems and really turned them into one and and you, you kind of stop looking at each of their own sets of capabilities as kind of silos of where they impact your workflow. But you've created an entire integrated workflow from the top down that has a multiple packages and software things talking to one another and because StorNext and its storage manager component are really so intrinsic, right? They're foundational. It is the file system, but it's also this obstruction for where files are across either multiple file systems or multiple storage technologies all together. We can have the ma'am, you know, the house on top, you know, you know, built squarely on the foundation in a way that, you know, it's frankly a unique level of integration possibility when we use quantum technologies to that level. We work with some other vendors who do archive software as well, but it's not as firmly planted, right? It's the level of integration and the possibilities, the scalability that that allows for really doesn't touch what we can do with,
Speaker 3 43:43 With StorNext and extend storage. It's comparing, comparing what this can do to a, to a NAZA. Alex was mentioning that earlier. It's, it's, it's really pretty. It's pretty amazing. Um, so guys, what's object storage? Tell us a little bit about RJ object storage and what that is.
Speaker 2 44:00 Object storage is a, is is very exciting. We could talk for hours about that.
Speaker 3 44:05 We, I just put on my beanie and it's spinning.
Speaker 2 44:10 So, so object storage is, is I call it a new way of representing data that literally will represent data as objects and in the true sense of objects, you've got a core, a kernel of uh, of some data surrounded by a metadata which, which can be uh, for example, uh, uh, universal ID or information about the object.
Speaker 0 44:34 So how's an object different than a file though? Skip, I mean let's break it down to the basics and to be blunt, this is an area where my own definition start to, you know, get a little more gray. I mean what is the difference between storing an object on a piece of disc based storage and storing a file on a piece of disc based storage? Cause it is a very radically different approach. Is it not?
Speaker 2 44:57 It is. It is really radical. So in the past, so I may have a long piece of video represented as one file sitting on a perhaps a raid system somewhere on an object storage based system. That same video file will be exploded into maybe a lot of different objects. Now once data is represented as objects, I can recreate them on the fly or here's where it gets really cool. Let's say a chunk of those objects that represent that whole file is missing. The objects themselves can essentially interpolate that missing information on the fly. And that's something that, as you say, that is completely science fiction and a completely different way to represent data. And what it means is that I can now in a very liquid and fluid way, move data around. I can, I can, um, say in internal distress or a component, uh, uh, on my system fails, no problem at all on the fly. The system can recreate any missing objects. Um, and at the end result is, is that you can represent that same information at far higher levels of resiliency than are possible with something like a raid six system.
Speaker 0 46:12 So like in a raid, right? The whole point of raid was so that we could sustain the loss of one or two drive. Say, you know with raid six we can lose two drives in a raid sets. We have these say 10 or 12 drives all working together essentially to what the raid itself sees as one drive. Right? It's the LUN. It's the thing that is on the inside of the box, but to anything outside of the raid controller, it kind of looks like it's working as one drive. But I guess is it fair to say skip in the way that raid was a level of redundancy for your data at the level of looking at say drive failures? Object storage now is a much more flexible redundancy system that can evils even sustain say the loss of entire chassies if not even facilities worth of storage because it's like the next level up and we can be much more flexible in terms of how we set up these redundancy schemes and always ensure that you know, even at larger levels of equipment failure and loss without even having to resort to backup systems per se, we can preserve the legitimacy of the entire data set because while it's not the exact algorithm that raids use to generate parody data, you know that data, there is something kind of analogous to that happening in the background that the object system is generating.
Speaker 0 47:36 Is that right?
Speaker 2 47:37 There is. So if, if you were challenged to build say a large volume with raid, you would literally have to build that probably in one rack or a couple of nearly adjacent racks. But you can in fact span cities. You can span systems in multiple cities. Perhaps an LA office and a San Jose office could all be part of this. Um, could all be part of one object storage based system like lattice. So it completely opens up new possibilities of how you can store as Alex calls, an extended online volume that can be available to all your, your all of your users and some pretty exciting.
Speaker 0 48:17 So let's, Oh, I just want it to like, let's quickly try to break this down into a specific scenario, right? This is where a lot of our clientele, especially some of the bigger clients that we work with, I think are, are struggling with right now, right? Because they may have multiple facilities around the country or around the planet. And in the case of a number of the folks that we deal with and you know, they have sets of users who each have their own storage silos. Say they have a bunch of different StorNext sands and you know, they know that there's files that are essentially identical to one another spread across these multiple facilities. They know there's times there's an asset in one facility that would be useful to people in another, but the other people aren't quite sure that it exists even. So they may end up essentially rebuilding something like a promo piece from scratch that they may be if they had had some insight or even accessibility to the other person's storage, they could have just, you know, gotten ahold of and saved some time.
Speaker 0 49:19 So paint the picture. Let's say someone is looking to move towards a more centralized data storage model for their media assets, but they want to give visibility into that system. Uh, you know, for multiple sets of users and they want to somehow leverage this, this, you know, redundancy even across physical sites that object storage can offer. You'll paint a, uh, an overview picture of what does that start to look like? What are the building blocks of, of quantum stuff, whether it's StorNext storage manager, lattice, how, how does one begin to assemble those into the type of info infrastructure I just described to accomplish all of those things?
Speaker 1 49:59 Well, well let's, let's take it up a level because that'll, that'll help get us to where we want to be. So just as you pointed out, like the, the customers out there, the, the, the clients that you have, whether they have a single facility or multiple full facilities, their workflows are usually locked to a facility. So the way it works is you have a number of client workstations, you know, users out there connect it to what they like to call an online storage, something they use every day. And this is where all their content resides. And then hopefully they have some type of a more resilient second copy because a best practice says, especially with raid, you know, I hear this all the time, people, people say to me, or I'll say to someone, so how are you archiving this? How are you backing it up?
Speaker 1 50:51 And they say, well I have raid. I never need to back it up cause that's safe. Well it's not necessarily safe. It's great for online, but you should always have a second copy. And I hear people say to me, well, I archived it to tape, therefore that's my backup copy. And I say, well, if you moved it off your online storage on a tape, you had one copy, you made one copy, you still have one copy and and the problem is the resiliency of that copy depending on how good the the tape is, you know anything can happen. So the idea that you want to have more than one copy and more than one place is really important and it gets more and more important as you have more and more content because you tend to have more and more people touching it and humans make mistakes like erase things.
Speaker 1 51:37 This happens. And also also your, your activity level on your, your archive goes up. So the building block pieces look like this. The workflow you have at your facility is going to have clients. Clients will be connected to online, online will probably connect, be connected to some kind of archive. What we do is we say, well the archive usually is far away. It's hard to get to it's tape. It's other things that you may get to it. Sometimes people put disks on shelves when they're small companies. Some people have a redundant copy of their rates system and they shut it off, which is really the wrong thing to do, but we can talk about that for hours. But the idea here is that we've built this thing called lattice. This object storage you guys were talking about and as you said Nick, the resiliency of this is think of rated at a different level.
Speaker 1 52:29 I always look at it as you have a bunch of boxes you put, you cut something into say 20 or 50 pieces. You take each piece and put it in a box and put the box somewhere. But guess what? You only need a few of those pieces to make all 50 make the data that's on 50 of them. And you know, depending on this, we call these durability policies. You could say if I had 50 pieces, I only need 20 to actually get all my data back so I could lose 30 pieces compared to something like raid six where you can lose two pieces. And those pieces have to be hard drives that are in the same as you called it. One. We could have these 50 pieces across thousands of hard drives or across as skip said, you know, across continents. And let's remember that like these drives that we're talking about, losing an arrayed set could be six or even eight terabyte drives.
Speaker 1 53:17 I mean that's a lot of data to lose at once and have to rebuild. Absolutely. And the problem with that is while you're rebuilding that data, and this is what people don't understand today, if you had a drive fail and you rebuild it, you have to use more horsepower in the rest of the discs to be able to deliver the content you're doing today and rebuild. So you're, you're putting a heavy strain on the rest of the drives and there was a chance you could have another drive fail. And if that happens in a raid six, you're still safe. But then those other drives that remain have to work even harder. And if you had another drive fail, you lose all your data. And that's called a cascading drive failure. It's not uncommon as raids age. So that's why people say to me a lot of times, while I've had my rate for five years, I'm gonna shut it off and put it on the shelf and keep it.
Speaker 1 54:02 You can't do that. I mean these things have a physical life of three to five years. You have to replace it. And the problem is you have to migrate the content off of onto something else, which again strains them real hard. So don't wait until they're just about ready to die and then copy the data over, migrated over because you're bound to kill the system you're on and you have a loss possibility. So what we've done is we've taken this idea of building this special purpose, still object storage called lattice. It's super high performance for object storage. It is also very resilient and it has unlimited scalability. So that same customer that has clients, they have online, we now in the middle between their online and our archive, we put something that we call extended online in there. And this is really where the object storage, and this is the beauty of StorNext and storage manager.
Speaker 1 54:53 The object storage becomes a much more resilient repository where you can put your content and it's connected physically connected to your online. So unlike archive where you'd have to pull the tape off the shelf or you'd have to go and copy something from somewhere to somewhere else. This becomes an extension and storage manager auto magically moves your content between your online to this extended online and it's more resilient. So I would say that if I'm, if I'm a company today doing work and I have, I have all my online work, let's say I'm doing episodic TV and I'm done with that show, I want to move it as quickly as I can to the lattice object storage as an extended online because it's actually safer in my extended online than it is in my online storage, my rates, storage. So I want to move it as quickly as I can.
Speaker 1 55:48 And knowing that object storage is nearly as fast as the online storage in data movement, I feel pretty safe in doing that. And that same facility in moving to extended online can do that even before you deliver the show. So you know, I'm going to break this up and I'm going to give you a, a concept, you know, but a lot of people may not know is that if you look at the time you ingest content and you bring digital content into your online storage, then you do work in process on it. You do editing, you do color correction, you do audio. These are all what I'll call real time operations. In some cases you could say ingest isn't really a real time operation. You would say that editing audio sweetening, color correction, it's to some extent conforming. Those are all real time operations, but there are other non real time operations all the way from archiving on ingest to delivery to proxy building, transcode, which is a workflow operation.
Speaker 1 56:49 All these things don't have to happen in real time. In fact, most of them happen either faster than real time because you have a a transcode farm or they take longer than real time to actually happen, such as in delivery where you're transcoding to go out and go for some IP type of delivery. So the beauty of extended online is we take these non real time functions and we move those to the extended online to the lattice object storage and the difference between a lattice object storage and your rate storage is that lattice has multiple ways in and out. What do I mean by that? So we connect all of the raid storage directly to the clients with the technology. They're fiber channel or ethernet, but some type of front end technology so they can touch that. But it's connected through this metadata controller, which is a, call it a traffic cop to say who has access to what pieces of content.
Speaker 1 57:47 The lattice optic storage is different, so it has a few different ways in and out. One way it has in is directly to stored X. It's fully seamless. So if it looks like it's there on your desktop and store next, it'll be there in your object storage. But guess what? It also has an IP capability with a controller we call an eight 10 and that gives you the ability to Mount it directly to the internet. And so that you can, you can connect it with users who are remote pulling these objects off remotely through a technology called rest or you can also connect it to other tools that you use for non real time applications such as trans coders, you know, delivery, delivery hubs. Anything you need to do to get to your CDN, anything you need to do to be able to do delivery or even from an ingest standpoint, you can connect this to a tape if you're ingesting from tape or you can connect it to your primary storage and ingest directly from, from your online storage.
Speaker 1 58:48 So this extended online is a way to get in there. Now that same thing, you've talked about facilities where they might have, might have multiple facilities. The key here is this extended online can live in all your facilities. So when you replicate your workflow in these facilities, the difference is the extended online can be in each one of these facilities. It will talk to itself in the background and it is much more efficient to be able to replicate the content. What we spreading the content, again, putting little spots, those little 50 little little dots, putting them in different boxes around the world then then it would be if you were to copy files and even with tools and accelerators and other tools, they're not as efficient in moving files as we are in moving objects. So the beauty of object storage and the way lattice object storage with extended online is that we move objects across a wagon or across a wide area network, whether it's the internet or a dedicated, a dedicated, um, you know, channel.
Speaker 1 59:59 We can move these objects anywhere in the world and spread the content so that all your facilities can have the same content or you can have multiple copies of the content in other facilities and do it in a seamless manner and virtually with no impact on your regular online work. Cause one of the problems people have always had, you know, this guy's having to install this, is that, you know, we used to have this thing in the it world called the backup window. Or you remember that, you know, people go home at night and it's five o'clock and everybody runs out and they all come in at eight in the morning and all their files are backed up. Well that was great. You know, it's still great if you're just doing emails. But in our world, first of all, things happen 24 seven and second of all, the files are so big they may take four days to back up.
Speaker 1 00:49 Well, how do you make a copy of something that takes four days to copy if you only have eight hours? And so there's no such thing as a backup window. So you have to be able to be able to deliver that same level of performance and still be able to archive and make copies, secondary copies of your content at the same time. And the problem was when we tried to sneak things in after the backup window, you know, we would hurt the performance of the primary system. As I said earlier, there's different aspects to a media entertainment workflow in storage than there is to something that you'd use, you know, for your email server or your it and where it is concerned with I ops meaning moving lots of small files and you can kind of get away with that, right? If I want to move lots of small files between other small files, I can kind of sneak those in.
Speaker 1 01:41 But the problem is when you're trying to deliver streams of files such as you have in media entertainment and you try to sneak other streams in the middle, it usually is very disruptive and it causes things like drop frames and in applications to crash. And that usually is on a scale of disaster movie. You know, that's, that's, you know, a disaster movie scale for a customer. Because, you know, the old joke in, in, uh, television production is what happens when we go to black screen. People get fired, right? And what happens in the real world is the customer changes channels. So you never want to have that happen. And object storage is a way to extend the online, give the, give the user a sense of having an a true feeling that they have multiple copies out there. They do it in a way that believe it or not is less expensive than online storage. And they do it in a way that adds increased resiliency. So more safety in the overall and they can do it in a geographic area. Shots like magic.
Speaker 3 02:44 Yeah, it, it, well, you know, you're really speaking to the, you know, the flexibility and the scalability of, of, of the, of these offerings. That's really awesome. And how does it do this? People math. But that's, that's about, yeah, that's about all I can describe. Right? Like I know, I know it's math and science, but you know, that's all when people are like, well how does that work? I go math and then I'm like, that should be a satisfactory answer.
Speaker 1 03:11 Funny thing is, you know, if you look at store next five, it's over 3 million lines of code. And it's not 3 million lines of code because we can share a file between, you know, 10 or a hundred or a thousand users. It's 3 million lines of code because it manages all the other stuff that needs to be done in the background, in this automagically magic manner. It's doing all the hard work for you and it's making it all seamless. And that is one of the things that quantum has had. And you know, skip, and I've seen this for a long time. One of the biggest advantages that you have over everybody else is that we own all the pieces and we've been able to work for years to put all those pieces together. So they just work. So I mean, you know it as, as an integration company, you know that you, you have your favorites, you pick and you do that because you know they're going to work together. I mean, when someone says, you know, can I, can I put a limit in an avocado together with a tomato? You go, well, it might not taste as good as, you know, a raspberry and a blueberry and a watermelon. You know, and
Speaker 3 04:17 I know it depends if you like guacamole, Alex <inaudible>
Speaker 1 04:24 Now a little plot. Um, but realistically that's um, there's some truth to, uh, to the ability of saying that things just work better when they, um, when they work. And quantum hat has a unique position of having a ecosystem that works together but in a way that everything's open. So there's an open standard, you were talking Nick, about API APIs that is the open standard glue that makes everything just work together. So we write one API that works with everything we have and it makes it so much easier for the application vendor to just make it all work together that they get done faster with easy to troubleshoot anything that they would ever have. And it gives the customer the flexibility to do what they want. So it's complex. I won't say it's not complex, but it's less complex than having to worry about
Speaker 0 05:18 What do I do when I get a black screen? And you know, the thing is, it's, it's complexity on the backend in order to achieve simplicity on the front end. Right? Yeah. Well said. Absolutely. That says it's really hard to make things easy. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I mean, it seems like, you know, that's very much a spirit you guys have taken with you from the Apple side, right? It's, it's all about let's make these things that make people's lives easier. In this particular segment, this particular space, we're going to put all sorts of thought and engineering and mathematics and development and you know, all of that into it on the back side because it is complex, but all to achieve a level of simplicity and fluidity and efficiency for the people who have to bang on it all day long and we're not on it. And all of that.
Speaker 3 06:10 What are some other new developments you guys have going on there? I mean, you've, you've talked about, um, you know, StorNext five and storage manager and how they work together and how that works with lattice. You know, you want to talk a little bit about the hardware, uh, some of the platforms that you know, you're using to sort of extend those plans.
Speaker 0 06:24 Yeah. And any just other developments, people might want to keep their eyes open for just coming out of quantum, you know, you have these pro solution bundles. But is there anything else coming down the pike that may be, you know, is worth, uh, you know, just paying attention to and what might people be seeing coming out of quantum and just kind of the new, you know, the current agenda?
Speaker 2 06:45 Absolutely. So, so we're coming back from IBC and at IBC we announced a new store, next pro solution and a store. Next pro solution is essentially a integrated solution of existing quantum technology to meet a specific need. So there's a storage pro solution for uh, <inaudible> people who are upgrading from actually HANA environments. There's one called StorNext pro 4k for people that wanna add a 4k editing into their environment. Um, and, and there, there was a third called StorNext pro production that was aimed at people that want to capture this end to end content management that we were talking about. So we added another held store, next pro work group that is designed to flexibly allow people to share that content across their organization. So that was our newest StorNext pro solution. But probably the bigger news at IBC was something called StorNext connect. So store next connect was a way to, uh, is software that will be installed on these store X pro solutions that allows you to finally take all of these different components throughout this whole solution and gather it into one sort of, you know, call it a pane of glass or one place to manage the entire environment.
Speaker 2 08:03 So it helps you as integrators and as customers managing a home environment to look at not just how one individual say raid system is performing or one individual client is behaving, but look at all the clients across the, uh, across the entire school.
Speaker 0 08:20 Sad. <inaudible> I saw this, I saw this a couple of weeks ago and I was, I was geeking out. I was pretty happy with it. It reminds me much of a development that had kind of been in progress, uh, at a former enterprise if your guys, but I'm, I'm, I'm M static about this new district development. Sorry, sorry. No, this, this does derive from kind of a mission you guys have been on for a while. Right. You know, there was this thing that I, you know, I think some people knew and even saw kind of glimpses of it active that was, you know, a very integrative pane of glass admin console for the system as a whole. And because you guys can control the entire stack, you have the ability to do that in a way that I think is very attractive to people who have to be monitoring system performance from top to bottom. Um, you know, and don't always get that if they have many vendors at the table or just frankly those admin consoles, like, you know, if you're building out your own custom, you know, Nagios implementation, there's just a ton of time and energy. And so it's great to hear that that's, you know, kind of carried through to, you know, your activities at quantum. And, you know, I know that'll make our lives easier. Definitely. We'll make our, our customers fives way easier. They're, they're basically asking us for these types of things. Yeah,
Speaker 2 09:42 You've gotten so, so guys, tell me if this resonates with you. I've always thought that when you're setting up one of these solutions, and maybe it's to as we say it in for 4k or, or you're integrating storage manager across a real production work or content workflow, um, I always thought that in order for one piece of software to try to address everything that you do, that it needs to operate in these three different modes and this concept is carried through it. You know, obviously it's something that we did with active stats, but also is you can see in store next connect. And the first is that you're, when you're setting up an environment, you need to discover exactly what's out there. You know, what's on the wire, can I see all the different pieces that comprise the solution? And that's a very, um, uh, you know, back in the day, Alex, you can help me with this.
Speaker 2 10:31 Steve jobs used to talk about the lean forward kind of experience and the lean back kind of experience. And he always said that, uh, you know, the, the portable or workstation has a lean forward experience and an iPad is more of a lean back experience. It's hard to interact or create a lot of content on an iPad. So in the same way when you're using the software, you're, you're, you're in an interrogative kind of mode where you're discovering everything in the environment and then you flip to a new mode once you've identified everything to configure it and set it up. And if you could configure, say for example all of your clients all at once or all of your metadata controllers or gateway controllers at once, that's where you want to do this sort of managed. So it's discover first, then manage. And finally, once everything's set up the way you like and the customer's happy and up and running, you're in this sort of lean back mode of just monitoring report. Yeah, absolutely. And then you want to drive groups. Yes. Immediately you need to know exactly what's going on. Absolutely. And you need to be able to flip between these different modes periodically. So, so that's something that I think a lot of people haven't cracked how to do that and how to accommodate all those different ways of working and, and that's what's fun about storage connection.
Speaker 0 11:44 Well that's exactly right. And again, the, we have to kind of scratch our heads to figure out how best to build, you know, the deployment strategy and the automation tools to help do the deployments. You know, figure out what's even in front of us, manage it across the groups in different silos, you know, have different stacks of equipment and then that reporting is just huge. Right? And you want it to be proactive, but you don't want to see every little chirp from, you know, SNMP that might happen or you're going to literally be flooded with thousands of emails per hour. Right? You need to, you need to have this, you know, 30,000 foot view on the systems that's smart enough to be proactive about alerting you to issues that you really, truly need to be aware of. Right? Like what's what's impacting user performance? What's impacting viability and availability of the volume, you know, what's impacting workflow or performance in a way that people are going to feel and have big flashing red lights and alarms that go off so to speak.
Speaker 0 12:45 You know, to alert you of those types of scenarios and give us other tools obviously to get more under the hood. But you know, it's hard to come up with those abstraction layers that kind of see a bunch of inputs, you know, as as you know, something that they can then make more abstract and give you this big one flashing light that really only flashes based on types of circumstances that that really call for you needing to be alerted in that type of a way that proactively that you know, in a sense disruptively but you want to be proactively disrupted when, when it's sensing that it meets a certain set of conditions. That's great. And it's, you know, it's obvious that you guys listen and are aware of the real on the ground realities for people dealing with these systems because you're focused on things like this and this is, this is really where the evolution of the needs is, is clearly going.
Speaker 0 13:40 And again, I don't think everyone, you know, unless they had had some of the very unique backgrounds that you guys have would be bringing that level of awareness into, you know, trying to solve those problems. Because to me as an integrator, it seems really obvious, but you get a lot of eggheads storage vendors and, and I don't think they identify the same set of needs that you guys do. You do it from a very user centric experience. Even if that user is an admin or creative director or an integrator like Chesapeake systems who's engaged with our clients from a support model perspective, you're serving our needs, you know, and, and, and it's, you know, the reason why you guys are, you know, tied to the hip with us as one of our absolutely most strategic, you know, vendor relationships, you know, bar none. No question.
Speaker 2 14:29 That's great. You guys definitely get it and you understand what's meant by the term. One of my favorite terms is intuitively obvious. You just know it. It makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. This will sound really familiar to you but I think it, it resonates with almost everyone. If you,
Speaker 1 14:47 I think about it a little bit is that in all that shatter you're talking about, you really don't care so much about notifications. You care about warning notifications. You can sort through whenever you want through warnings are important and knowing what is important and what's not important is really the key and being able to put an emphasis on what's important and deemphasize what's not important is what we tried to do at Starbucks connect. And one more thing that skipped touched on, but I want to hit really hard on really quickly is the idea that story next connect aggregates the information you need to know based on the way you have built the system. So, for instance, you talked a lot about ones in individual discs and individual drives. And that's really cool. And that's the way most people who haven't been in the business, or maybe they haven't worked for Apple for a number of years and they don't have that sense of it, but they tend to look at it and go, here's exactly what this box does.
Speaker 1 15:53 And that box does and this box does. But we both know that part of that box will be on one volume and part of that box will be in another volume and a volume may may spread across, you know, 10 of those boxes or two of those boxes. And what you care about is the performance of that volume that's connected to those clients, not those individual boxes. So what we've done with StorNext connect then again, it'll seem very familiar to you is what we've done is we've aggregated the performance, the information, the warnings, all that into the individual performance of those volumes, not the boxes. So it's a much more useful tool at a glance than it would be for you to have to do that math thing. And figure out what to throw away and what to keep. And to me it's about setting that performance initially and tuning it and then maintaining it. And then, God forbid if something bad happens, how do I get back to that perfect state again? And knowing that and knowing that most of our users are not full time it people or this isn't all they do for a living. Knowing that that's the case, you know they have other better things to do than have to read a hundred page manuals. So we try to make this a lot easier and a lot more intuitive as skip says.
Speaker 0 17:20 That's fantastic. And again it's, it's, you guys are looking at solving these problems from a solutions perspective. There's other people who sell raids, there's other people who sell NAS, there's other people who sell storage of one flavor or another. But I think there's no other party addressing storage and just data needs, you know, on a solutions level specifically for people dealing with the challenges of media file types and workflows like you guys are. You just don't see that level of attention and energy being put into those things that you know are clearly being developed out of an understanding of the space and its unique set of requirements. Any timeline for seeing a realization of these things, you know, as a, as a tool that's part of our arsenal, you know, actively or is there, you know, is it a little more just TBD at this point? And this is kind of in development background right now.
Speaker 1 18:15 So I would say that what you're going to do is you're going to see, you're going to see store next connect in the December timeframe in the StorNext pro solutions and you're going to see us drive towards one more thing, which I believe makes the most sense and you're going to see this over the next few months is the idea that we're taking everything we've learned about high performance solutions, about taking technologies that were formerly very, very expensive and we've been able to make them more affordable and match them as four organizations. And we will continue to do that. You'll see us drive down the cost of entry of these solutions. You know, similar to what we did at Apple. You know, if you, if you think about it, you, we drove that cost down of someone to be able to have shared storage. We're doing that again here and what we're trying to do is really not only just drive the cost down as some people do by using less connected components or taking generic, you know, call it horizontal storage boxes and making them fit.
Speaker 1 19:23 Right. I mean if you try hard enough, you can fit that round peg in a square hall. You just need a bigger hammer. And that's what people try to do. Instead we're taking what we've learned about tuning and optimization and being able to size things correctly and we've been able to lower the price. And you saw that with StorNext pro solutions, you know by offering service fairs kits where people don't have to wait for someone to come and pay expensive service for someone to be there in four hours. We put them there so that you know, Chesapeake could grab a, a service spare off the shelf and plug into the system or tell the customer off the phone how to get it running right away. You've seen us change the model of the way we started licensing the, and I think you're going to see a lot more of that coming towards the end of the year and you'll see us drive that cost out and build systems that are more scalable from the bottom up. And if I can say hi,
Speaker 0 20:20 That's great. It sounds like it's going to be an exciting 2015 and a 2015 that probably will bring you know, even more of quantum offerings into an even larger set of our users hands, which we've been pushing on for ages. We're thrilled to hear, hear about. Um, one thing I'll mention and guys just thank you so much for all the time today, the insight which is always as deep and informed as anyone anyone will ever hear from anyone in this industry. So it's much appreciated you guys being guests today. Um, but one thing I'll say to our listeners, you know, stay tuned, um, through Chesapeake system's website. You'll hear soon about some upcoming events and other activities with quantum that will again, not just be focused on the, you know, this is some cool stuff to make a really cool hard drive icon on your desktop.
Speaker 0 21:08 It's going to be deeper level demonstrations that are very workflow oriented, very oriented around how you can use this bevy of, of technologies that we've been talking about today to frankly achieve new workflow possibilities and actually tie that to the day to day lives of your users. And so we have some upcoming stuff that should probably be getting announced relatively soon. That again is probably closer to the end of the year timeframe. Hopefully not too close to the holidays. We'll try to make it convenient for people, but it should be very exciting. And again, it'll be, you know, Chesapeake systems and quantum and probably some other vendors in the ma'ams space all coming together to really show this stuff off and open people's eyes to what does all of this stuff when piece together really allow the users, it's not just to be cool and it's not just so people can spend a ton of money. It's this now achieves something new that you couldn't do before and it's as easy and inexpensive and elegant to deploy as it's ever been. So we're thrilled to continue to work with you guys closely. As a partner and it just again, sounds like wonderful things are in store that make you guys, you know, even more relevant than you've been and even more relevant to a greater set of people in this world, which is great. We love having quantum in people's lives amongst our client base. It's something we're very comfortable supporting and representing to people.
Speaker 1 22:35 Well keep pushing us guys and we'll, we'll, we'll keep trying to deliver the best we can. Absolutely. Yeah
Speaker 0 22:41 Guys, thank you so much. Take care and thank you for listening to episode three Oh one of the workflow show and again we want to thank so much to Alex and skip and all the folks at quantum for being on today. All right, thank you everyone. Ciao. The workflow show is a production of Chesapeake systems. We welcome your comments and suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can
[email protected]
Speaker 4 23:08 That's workflow
[email protected] and if you'd like to talk with a member of our team of experts about your particular digital media workflow needs, email
[email protected] that's pro
[email protected] or call us at (410) 752-3406 that's (410) 752-3406 we appreciate your listening to the workflow show and we'll catch you next time.
Co-hosts Nick Gold and Jason Whetstone begin the third season of our popular audio podcast series with an in-depth, wide-ranging conversation with Quantum's Alex Grossman and Skip Levens. Alex is the VP of Media and Entertainment at the company and Skip is Director, Technical Marketing.
In this episode, we get a good feel for Alex and Skip's driving passion, that they have carried with them since their early days at Apple: to make storage -- as it becomes ever more complicated on one hand -- more flexible and seamless to today's video end-users.
While delving into a bit a geek-dom along the way (which we're not afraid to do here on The Workflow Show), any listener, regardless of his or her tech savviness, will appreciate the explanations Alex and Skip provide about Quantum's StorNext 5, StorageManager and Lattus object storage -- the latter being an almost sci-fi game-changer for the industry. The conversation also covers specific offerings within the bundle of StorNext Pro Solutions including StorNext Pro WorkGroup, which was recognized with a Best of Show award at IBC 2014.
Also announced at the expo was StorNext Connect, which is a new enhancement that allows for monitoring performance across the whole storage environment via one "pane of glass" if you will. StorageConnect will start appearing within StorNext Pro Solutions around December, and Alex and Skip also suggested that we stay tuned for soon-to-come manifestations of company-wide efforts to make certain products more affordable while still maintaining the functionality and reliability we've come to expect from Quantum.
Yes, you may be glad that storage is, in the end, just an icon on your desktop, but gaining a bit of understanding about what's under the hood certainly will prove advantageous as you consider storage solutions down the road. Listening to this episode will be 84-minutes well spent.
As always, The Workflow Show is available on iTunes
We welcome your comments — and suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can fill out the form below or email us at [email protected].
And if you’d like to talk with a member of our team of experts about your particular digital media workflow needs, email us at [email protected] — or call us at 410.752.3406.
SHOW NOTES (mainly, items requiring a bit more background to what was mentioned in the show)
NeXt
Oculus Rift headset
Media 100
Xsan
Active Storage
Xsan
StorNext
ActiveSAN
IOPS
throughput
latency
SAN Fusion
StorNext 5
SAN vs. NAS
StorageManager
StorNext 5 "affinities"
API's - Application Programming Interface
REST
StorNext Pro Workgroup
