Home Enterprise Podcast #126: A Myriad of Storage Topics with Quantum

Podcast #126: A Myriad of Storage Topics with Quantum

by Harold Fritts

Our podcast has Brian introducing Jordan Winkelman from Quantum Corporation.  If you remember, we did a deep dive review of Quantum Myriad a few weeks ago. To prepare for that review, Brian traveled to the Quantum office in Denver, where he met up with Jordan in the breakroom. The discussion expanded to include AI topics like security and surveillance, all things storage and a bit of space-related topics.

Our podcast has Brian introducing Jordan Winkelman from Quantum Corporation.  If you remember, we did a deep dive review of Quantum Myriad a few weeks ago. To prepare for that review, Brian traveled to the Quantum office in Denver, where he met up with Jordan in the breakroom. The discussion expanded to include AI topics like security and surveillance, all things storage and a bit of space-related topics.

Jordan has spent over 25 years in the technology industry with technical roles supporting advertising, retail, medical, VoIP, and enterprise software and infrastructure solutions. More recently, for the past eight years, he has supported scale-out storage and field technology practices at Quantum. Jordan brings a wealth of experience in designing, testing, validating, and optimizing technology solutions for businesses of all sizes.

Quantum was very engaged in the review process and provided great support and detail. This podcast reveals the same level of attention from Jordan and provides a lively discussion on storage, security, containers, and a lot more.

Jordan and Brian go deep on technology and how the storage market has progressed over the years. There’s reminiscing about old 40MB storage drives and how difficult it is to get funding from Silicon Valley for a storage company startup. It’s a fun discussion and worth the time.

If you want to skip around the podcast, we have provided a timeline below, so feel free to jump to the topics that are more important to you.

Live on our Discord.

00:00  Introduction

  • What isn’t Quantum
  • 43-year-old storage company
  • A bit of history around Quantum drives
  • Purchased AIC Scalar Robotic Tape Library
  • Myriad
    • What’s coming for Myriad

05:00 Talking about Hard Drives

  • A bit of history about HDDs
  • LTO tape
    • Tape rebound
    • Tape use
    • Tape densities
  • Call it Cold Storage
  • Erasure coding

10:00  Meeting customer SLAs

  • Use cases for Object to Tape
    • Education
    • Medical
    • Financial
  • Things that need to be stored for many years
  • Financial incentives to retain tape
  • Where will data be consumed
  • Viewing in the MSG Sphere

15:00  Is it local, or is it streaming?

  • Is there a massive secure pipe for video
  • Is reliable transmission infrastructure available to stream
  • Media companies are set up for any streaming failure
    • Multiple data centers
    • multiple network routes
    • It works for movies, TV shows, theaters, etc.
  • How is Quantum addressing streaming vs. live content?
    • Premier League football
    • FI
    • Superbowl
    • Companies want to monetize all content
  • Quantum is widely deployed throughout this industry
  • Using a media asset management system
  • High likelihood content is flowing through a Quantum product

20:00  Live clips

  • Higher frame rate, higher resolution
    • May capture data in 8K but only stream 4K
      • Having the ability to upres at a later date
  • Video capture
    • Cameras can ingest at different frame rates

25:00  Networking impact

  • Serial Digital Interface (SDI)
  • M&E still uses FC
    • mostly because of low latency
    • Ethernet still has latency issues
    • Moving to IP-based technologies called 2110

30:00  PCI is changing with Gen 4, Gen 5, and Gen 6

  • GPU Servers
    • Storage Heavy
    • Filling the bays tends to oversubscribe lanes
  • Use Myriad’s high-performance platform
    • Ability to support hundreds or thousands of concurrent connections
  • Systems are designed differently today
    • Some support high performance for unstructured data
      • AI Workloads
  • Requires high-performance Ethernet interconnects

35:00  AI means different things to different people

  • Training and developing models
  • Inferencing workloads at the edge
  • It cannot be run in a silo
  • Still a breakdown in structured vs unstructured data
  • Integrated Deduplication and data reduction
  • Find the place where data lives to generate money

40:00  Power and Cooling

  • SSDs generate more heat than HDDs
  • Keeping the GPUs fat
  • Quantum’s take on liquid cooling
  • Data center designers understand the physics of cooling
    • Quantum doesn’t get that involved
    • Focus on maintaining media stability
  • Moving to an environmentally controlled box outside the data center

45:00  Where is the best place to store non-revenue data?

  • Data may have intrinsic value
    • Where to store that data
    • The cloud may not be cost-effective for that data
    • Why didn’t Blu-Ray succeed in the data center?
  • Why is tape still the best answer
  • Talk about CD and the misconceptions
  • DNA based storage, ceramic, optical
  • Technologies entering the storage market

50:00  DNA Storage

  • Still a long way off
  • Quantum has invested heavily in that space
  • Consortiums contribute heavily  with knowledge and technology
  • Hammer Technology has been in the news for over 20 years
    • Technology takes a long time to go mainstream
  • New things
    • Object storage on tape
    • Tape is not slow

55:00  Fitting media into a footprint

  • Is it tape?
  • Is it drives?
  • Is it tapes and drives?
  • How can you make the most dense library
    • cost-effective
    • Physical footprint
  • Redundant Array of Independent Libraries (RAIL)
  • Build off-the-shelf consumer product
  • Scale
  • Physical deployment
  • LTL consortium

60:00  Wrap up

Quantum

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