NAB: Quantum F-Series 2U 24-Bay NVMe SSD Arrays

Quantum Corp. announced the F-Series, a line of NVMe storage arrays designed for performance, availability and reliability.

Using NVMe flash drives for fast reads and writes, it supports parallel processing and is designed for studio editing, rendering, and other performance-intensive workloads utilizing large unstructured datasets.

Incorporating the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking technology, the F-Series provides direct access between workstations and the NVMe storage devices, delivering predictable, fast network performance. By combining these hardware features with the Quantum Cloud Storage Platform and the StorNext file system the F-Series delivers end-to-end storage capabilities for post-production houses, broadcasters, and other rich media environments.

F2000 hardware architecture
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The first product in the F-Series is the F2000, a highly available storage server, purpose built for NVMe. It is a 2U, dual node server with two hot-swappable compute canisters and up to 24 dual-ported NVMe drives. Each compute canister can access all 24 NVMe drives, and includes processing power, memory, and connectivity designed for the high performance and availability.

Software-defined architecture
The F-Series is based on the firm’s Cloud Storage Platform, a software-defined block storage stack tuned specifically for video and video-like data. It offers a proof and reliable platform, eliminating data services unrelated to video while enhancing critical capabilities such as enhanced data protection, flexible networking and block interfaces. The result is an efficient architecture that maximizes streaming performance.

Cloud storage platform architecture

Integrated with StorNext
Thiscloud storage platform is integrated with StorNext, further boosting its end-to-end storage capabilities. It improves collaboration through comprehensive multi-protocol access, protects data through replication and copy functionality, and offers automated tiering of data to capacity-optimized storage.

This allows customers to reduce TCO and maximize the value of content across its entire life-cycle for cutting edge workflows such as those found in:

Post-production: The F-Series is designed for real-time editing of 4K and 8K content to meet the needs of demanding producers, directors, and studio executives.
Sports video: Suited to environments with tens to hundreds of cameras generating content, the series are capable of handling multiple concurrent ingest streams and playing out this content in real-time.
Rendering and simulation: The series can be deployed in animation and visual effects studios that require high IO/s and low-latencies between large-scale render farms and the storage subsystem.

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Benefits of F-Series
They will enable customers to:

Ingest, edit, and finish content with lightning fast performance: The series is as much as 5x faster than traditional flash storage/networking, delivering low-latency, and hundreds of thousands of IO/s per chassis.
Gain predictable, low latency access via FC or Ethernet: Enables users to reduce infrastructure costs by moving from FC to Ethernet IP-based infrastructures.
Meet performance requirements with less rack space: Customers who use a large number of HDDs or SSDs to meet their performance requirements can gain back racks of data center space.

Tom Coughlin, president, Coughlin Associates, said: “NVMe-based SSD solutions are making their way into modern workflows to support the performance demands of 8K+ high frame rate video production. Quantum’s F-Series provides a valuable contribution to this transition to NVMe solutions. Combined with StorNext and its out-of-band metadata management, the F-Series provides storage tiering, content protection and diverse software defined management capabilities that should be well received by the media and entertainment industry.“

Jason Paquin, CEO, Chesapeake Systems, said: “With 4K being the new normal, and 8K coming on the horizon, NVMe enables creatives to prepare for the future while keeping infrastructure costs under control. Quantum’s F-Series NVMe appliance could be the silver bullet media production houses have been waiting for to solve the performance problem posed by 4K and UHD workflows.“

Jamie Lerner, president and CEO, Quantum, said: “This is the most significant product launch we’ve done in years, not only because our F-Series product line will enable our customers in media to produce more great hi-def content faster over IP networks, but because the F-Series is the first product line based on the Quantum Cloud Storage Platform. This platform is a stepping stone for us and for our customers, to move to a more software-defined, hyperconverged architecture, and is at the core of additional products we will be introducing later this year.“

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Resources:
F-Series DS
NVMe for Media and Entertainment eBook
Webinar: Improving M&E Workflows by Utilizing NVMe Enhanced Storage Resources

Read also:
NAB: Quantum Unveils NVMe Flash Platform and Solutions for Multiple Workflow Stages
And StorNext 6.2 release for shared storage, S3 interface to Xcellis appliances, and 100GbE and 32Gb FC connectivity options
March 19, 2019 | Press Release