Podcast #126: A Myriad of Storage Topics with Quantum

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
- DNA Storage Alliance
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