Quantum has had a busy year. They acquired Western Digital’s ActiveScale object storage product line, launched their more affordable F1000 NVMe product targeting smaller post houses, and reorganized their engineering division. All of which means, CEO Jamie Lerner has been a very busy man.

When Lerner joined the company, Quantum was under investigation by the SEC and had been delisted from the NYSE. Those issues are now resolved, and the company is trading on NASDAQ. We recently reached out to Lerner to talk about next steps for the company and what it looks like doing business in the midst of a global pandemic.

What’s happening in the world right now is unprecedented. How is Quantum dealing with this coronavirus crisis?
First, we’ve focused on the safety and health of our employees, our families and our communities. We transitioned very quickly to a mostly remote workforce while securing key infrastructure and supply chains, without disrupting productivity. We’ve been reaching out to our customers, offering to help in any way, and letting them know that we’re available for service issues and to support business continuity. We’re all in this fight together, and we’re here to support our customers and the industry in any way we can.

How are your users handling the crisis?
Many are in a similar situation — their primary focus is employee health and safety, business continuity, and enabling remote work. We are working hand in hand with our media customers to enable remote production by helping them access their large storage repositories from home, using tools such as virtualization, remote desktop technologies and lossless compression to move data between sites.

Looking at the bigger picture, we expect this situation to change workflows forever. A crisis like this one can be a driver for earthshaking innovations, and we’re working closely with some of our top customers on what this means for their workflows in the coming months, and even years ahead.

As we look forward, can you tell us about the new products you’ve been building? And you acquired the ActiveScale object storage business from Western Digital recently.
In a crisis like this one, customers need innovation. We continue to innovate; we continue to be acquisitive. We just introduced the Quantum F1000 NVMe storage server, which will make NVMe storage more accessible to smaller studios and post houses by keeping costs down and bringing the capabilities found in the F2000 within reach for customers that don’t require high availability. They get all high-speed access and ability to complete rendering, without disrupting their workflows, so they can maintain business continuity. We expect we’ll continue to see broad adoption of NVMe for the highest-performance, highest-resolution media production in the coming years.

In terms of the acquisition, the feedback from our users and partners has been overwhelmingly positive. Even with the impact of COVID-19, customers have been investing in object storage for large-scale content repositories, and object storage will also be very important for the workflows of tomorrow.

You just mentioned object storage, which is what ActiveScale is. Can you talk about how object storage fits into an M&E workflow?
Quantum has been reselling the ActiveScale product line and technology for many years, and we were consistently hearing from our customers and collaborators that object storage would be a natural addition to Quantum’s portfolio of products and solutions. Object storage is valuable as a long-term content repository for video content, in movie and TV production, in sports video, and even for large corporate video departments. We see customers in feature and broadcast production who require very high-performance ingest, edit, processing and rendering of their video files, which typically is done with a file system like StorNext. Once content is finished, it is preserved in an object store, with StorNext data management handling the data movement between file and object tiers.

The F1000 was a direct result of industry feedback. How does this reflect your approach to product development?
Now more than ever, listening to our customers and partners is essential. In the case of the Quantum F-series, it was clear that they valued NVMe for its ability to accelerate workloads, for enabling them to move from fibre channel networks to less expensive IP-based networks, and for facilitating content sharing from remote work locations. At the same time, there were customers who asked for a less expensive entry point into NVMe technology, which is what led us to the development of the Quantum F1000.

Quantum has kept up a brisk tempo of product innovations over the last 18 months, not only in M&E, but also in adjacent markets like video surveillance and autonomous vehicle development.

What makes your products suitable for M&E workflows, and what trends do you see in terms of storage in post use cases?
Today, Quantum StorNext has deep integration with the media production ecosystem — API integration with all of the leading asset management platforms, file system client integration with the macOS, and
data management capabilities that become more critically important every day. With new products like the F-Series, we can build on our performance leadership, in particular for workflows that require the fastest streaming performance.

For VFX, color grading and rendering, utilizing NVMe allows our customers to perform realtime work on high-resolution/high-framerate-productions. With NVMe, we drastically reduce disk seek latencies, and we’re able to provide performance speeds of up to 22-23GB/sec to a single workstation over our F2000 product with RDMA. Our customers are working with multiple streams of 4K UHD and 8K at 60 frames per second. In the world of rendering, our products (the F2000 and F1000) with NVMe can perform far above traditional storage devices and slower network speeds.

As for trends, like I said, we think this pandemic will change workflows forever. Both hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures will become standard, and helping customers move and manage their data from on-prem to cloud, and between clouds — these are some of the conversations happening right now.

A lot of post houses have adopted StorNext for file management. Can you give a preview on how StorNext will be evolving going forward?
Our next version of StorNext will be dramatically easier to use, and we are adding more dynamic data tiering capabilities built into the file system. For on-premise deployments, we are moving to a smaller hardware footprint. And as we virtualize StorNext, we will be moving toward both hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud deployment options.

We will continue to collaborate with our customers to shape this roadmap and build the best solutions for the workflows of tomorrow.