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Interview: Page (1) of 1 - 01/16/08

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Quantum Corp.'s Ingo Fuchs

Discusses broadcast storage trends and new products

By Michael Ames

Broadcast facilities have huge amounts of data to manage and distribute, from the data being generated everyday to libraries of the past, all that data needs to be stored somewhere. DMN recently spoke with Ingo Fuchs, Product Marketing Manager for Quantum Corp., to get his take on the latest storage trends, as well as the solutions that Quantum offers to broadcast facilities.

DMN: How are the large broadcast companies handling the huge amounts of data now being generated and stored in the digital domain?
Ingo Fuchs: Large broadcast companies have been faced with the challenges of storing digital assets for quite some time. These start with ingesting digital content with increasing data rates into digital storage systems, storing and sharing those assets for post-production work and managing mid- and long-term data retention for those assets.

On the ingest side, new technologies in regards to ingest servers and digital camera technology help, however it is important that the digital content can be ingested and stored on suitable digital storage mediums at increasingly faster data rates. Once the digital assets are stored, they need to be accessible and shared to various applications, often running on a variety of operating systems and hardware platforms. Once those assets are no longer immediately used, they are typically designated for either an active (accessible, transparent) or passive (long-term off-site, often non-transparent) archive.
 
Quantum`s StorNext Software assists large broadcast companies today in every stage of the workflow, from ingesting into a fast, scalable storage environment to an active, transparent policy-based archive for mid- and long-term retention.
 
StorNext File System provides a single, homogeneous namespace across heterogeneous storage systems, enabling applications on Linux, Windows, UNIX or Mac OS X systems (using Apple`s Xsan client software) to share and access the same files at the same time. StorNext leverages SAN and LAN technologies, so that applications can run real-time editing across fast SAN infrastructures while leveraging LAN technology for applications that do not require real-time access or work on smaller data sets.
 
In addition, StorNext Storage Manager is used by broadcast companies to transparently and automatically move content between tiers of storage, including fast FC-based disk storage systems, large capacity SATA-based disk systems or digital data tape archives based on a variety of tape formats. This enables a cost-optimized strategy for storing content while at the same time preserving that single, consistent namespace (i.e. Editors can see all assets, regardless of application, operating system, storage vendor or disk vs. tape tier).
 
DMN: Previously these assets were largely analog tape based. Are the broadcast companies working to move those archives to a digital format, and how are they accessing that content?
IF: In our experience most large broadcast companies are increasingly moving to all-digital workflows. This trend is accelerated by the desire to leverage multiple delivery vehicles (traditional broadcast, re-purposing for Web, DVD`s, etc.).
 
DMN: Distribution is also a challenge with regard to broadcast content. How does Quantum's StorNext solution address broadcast facilities needs to distribute content in multiple forms and formats?
IF: By providing a scalable, vendor-independent virtualization layer between physical storage and applications, StorNext gives customers the ability to easily and quickly expand storage space or increase throughput as needed to keep up with growing demands in the world of digital broadcast. 
 
DMN: How does StorNext address the various platforms and operating systems that live in a broadcast ecosystem?
IF: One of StorNext`s unique characteristics is the open systems approach towards supporting a wide range of products, vendors and platforms. StorNext supports practically all FC- or iSCSI based storage systems, regardless of vendor. In addition StorNext supports tape technology from vendors such as HP, IBM, Sun/STK and Quantum. Regarding supported operating systems you can find a wide range of platforms from Linux (such as Red Hat and SuSE), various flavors of Windows and UNIX (such as Solaris, Irix and HP-UX). A complete list of supported hardware and software platforms can be found here.

In addition StorNext is fully compatible with Apple`s Xsan. This compatibility means that

a)       Customers that have already deployed an Apple Xsan and use applications running on Mac OS X can share their Xsan file system with other applications running on Linux, Windows or UNIX by using StorNext FX, the StorNext client Software for Xsan.

b)       Customers that deploy StorNext can purchase Xsan licenses from Apple and use the Xsan client on Mac OS X systems to access a StorNext file system that is also used by StorNext clients on Linux, Windows or UNIX.

In both cases all applications and operating systems share the same namespace simultaneously and transparently.

The key benefits for the customer resulting from the open StorNext architecture are:

a) Ability to choose best-of-breed products and vendors for storage, server platforms and infrastructure such as Fibre Channel or Ethernet, without being limited to a single vendor

b) Cost savings accomplished through leveraging existing HW and SW products, limiting the learning curve and reducing implementation cost

c) Investment protection as customers can upgrade individual aspects of the solution as needed
 
DMN: What about scalability? How does StorNext address it? Does the client purchase additional storage modules and the software configures it into the storage solution?
IF: StorNext easily scales beyond typical requirements of large broadcast companies. Customers today use petabyte-size archives, 100s of Terabytes in single file systems, hundreds of clients attached to a single storage environment. Customers are able to pin-point individual components within their environment that limit scalability and replace those with more scalable components. StorNext itself will typically not be the limiting factor, as it has been designed specifically for scalability in regards to performance and capacity.

From a licensing perspective, customers purchase the number of client licenses needed for their environments (additional clients can easily be added) and additional archive capacity is licensed by managed capacity in the archive (which can also be increased easily). Furthermore there are certain incremental options available, such as Checksum generation and verification for assets that are stored on tape media.
 
DMN: Why Not NAS?
IF: This somewhat depends on the definition of NAS used in this context. Today, most traditional NAS systems leverage protocols such as NFS or CIFS to gain access to a closed storage system. While this allows easy sharing of storage resources, customers often find that it misses the scalability (speed and capacity) that they need as well as a native presentation of the storage capacity and namespace to a variety of applications and operating systems.

StorNext, on the other hand, leverages SAN infrastructure to gain the performance benefits of SAN, combined with the sharing capabilities provided through the file system clients. Each client "sees" a local resource, even though it is shared among many systems. The open infrastructure approach allows users to increase capacity and throughput easily by investing in additional (vendor-neutral) storage capacity or infrastructure, such as switches and HBAs.

StorNext also introduced a new feature in April 2007, with the release of StorNext 3.0, called Distributed LAN Client or DLC. This feature now takes the StorNext client into the LAN, adding easy scalability in environments where a SAN infrastructure might be cost-prohibitive. Strictly speaking, DLC is a form of NAS, as it expands the shared file system into LAN-attached systems.
 
DMN: What about data protection? What protection does StorNext offer users to ensure that data is secure?
IF: StorNext Storage Manager offers built-in data protection, in addition to the transparent, dynamic archiving functionality. At the same time, StorNext is open to backup applications that are used by customers for traditional data protection tasks. In our experience more and more customers in the broadcast field favor the built-in Storage Manager data protection functionality versus separate backup packages because of increased ease-of-use and efficiency, paired with the benefit of transparent data access regardless of physical location of a file (e.g. disk versus tape).
Another way that StorNext protects customers` digital assets is by access-based or schedule-based creation of data protection copies, versioning (i.e. multiple versions of a file as it gets changed over time) and multiple simultaneous data protection copies onto multiple targets (e.g. one copy on disk, one copy on Data Reduction Storage ? a form of data de-duplication available in StorNext), one copy to on-site tape and finally one copy to off-site tape). Additional features such as Checksum generation and validation ensure that data is consistent and un-altered.

DMN: How does de-duplication work?
IF: De-duplication, or more specifically a variable-length block approach to reducing data storage requirements, is a method to reduce the amount of physical storage capacity needed to store a specific amount of data. Essentially a de-duplication algorithm looks inside a customer`s data set (e.g. while written into an archive as implemented in StorNext) and finds redundant data blocks that may be of variable length. Once those data blocks are identified, only the first occurrence of such a block is physically stored, other occurrences reference back to the already stored block. This technology is loss-free as the original data is not altered, merely redundant blocks are replaced by references to the original blocks.

In other words ? Data De-Duplication is a way to reduce storage cost by eliminating redundancies within a customer`s data set.

De-duplication, however, is a term that is often used in different ways by various vendors, sometimes used to market inferior technologies while riding the "de-duplication wave". Customers are advised to inquire with their vendors as to the exact implementation of de-duplication in their respective products.

For more information on the use of de-duplication in the backup/recovery world you might want to take a look at Quantum`s de-duplication page .
  
For more information about StorNext for the broadcast market, please look here .