The cloud has become a core part of Media and Entertainment workflows, delivering unmatched flexibility, scalability, and efficiency. Until now, top-tier data durability and maintenance meant relying on major providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. But Quantum is redefining the game. With ActiveScale, you can operate your own object storage with equal or even superior data durability, seamless scalability, and revolutionary self-maintenance features—often at a lower cost—all while maintaining the simplicity of S3 storage.
What is ActiveScale?
Quantum ActiveScale is a scalable object storage solution for long-term retention and efficient management of massive unstructured data volumes. Its scale-out architecture, consisting of interconnected high-density storage nodes, all working together, ensures high performance, extreme data durability (up to 19 nines), and seamless scalability into the petabyte or exabyte range.
Supporting multiple access methods, including S3 (Standard and Glacier) and NFS, ActiveScale integrates Quantum’s RAIL Architecture (Redundant Array of Independent Libraries), combining NVMe, HDDs, and LTO tapes for optimized performance and cost efficiency. ActiveScale ensures high data resiliency with configurable erasure coding policies for both Active and Cold Storage Classes, allowing you to optimize deployments based on capacity, performance, availability, and durability requirements.
Dynamic Data Placement (DDP) features configurable erasure coding that prevents hot spots, effectively manages hardware failures, and allows for easy resource expansion. This eliminates the disruptive rebalancing often seen in traditional static policies, intelligently distributing data evenly across all available storage resources according to user-defined policies.
Dynamic Data Repair (DDR) constantly monitors the system to verify data integrity, detect potential failures, and autonomously heal object data, ensuring maximum durability. Its self-healing process works independently of drive replacements and runs in parallel, greatly reducing rebuild times. When a drive fails, a rebuild begins proactively rather than waiting for the drive to be replaced. This active data repair mechanism allows you to visit your data center only occasionally to replace drives in bulk.
Seamless Integration with the ELEMENTS Platform
ActiveScale isn’t just an archive destination within the ELEMENTS platform—it becomes a fully integrated part of the media workflow. Users can leverage the ELEMENTS Media Library, Automation Engine, and ELEMENTS Client to mount ActiveScale workspaces as local drives, ensuring a seamless experience. Within the ELEMENTS WebUI, ActiveScale appears as a node on the Status page, providing real-time status updates for uncomplicated monitoring and management.
When creating a workspace in the ELEMENTS WebUI, users have the option to choose which filesystem the workspace should be stored on. Simply choose ActiveScale to create a workspace on it.
The ELEMENTS Automation Engine simplifies complex workflows by allowing users to intuitively automate tasks through a customizable chain of actions. Despite its user-friendly design, it can handle advanced operations such as transcoding, notifications, filesystem and cloud management, and even custom Python and Shell scripts. With full integration, ActiveScale can be seamlessly used as both a source and a destination within all automation tasks.
The ELEMENTS Media Library seamlessly integrates with ActiveScale, providing a powerful media asset management solution, which allows users to easily access, preview, and collaborate on content stored on ActiveScale. With features like content sharing, rough-cut editing, and seamless collaboration, teams can efficiently manage and work with their media assets—no matter where they are.
The ELEMENTS Media Library provides secure, global access to your content, enabling seamless collaboration across teams. Its powerful search function makes finding footage in the ActiveScale environment effortless, allowing users to combine multiple search criteria. With preview proxies retained even after archiving, the Media Library creates a fully searchable media archive where footage can be played back or restored with a single click.
The ELEMENTS Client seamlessly integrates with ActiveScale, allowing users to mount workspaces from ELEMENTS shared storage, ActiveScale, and cloud buckets simultaneously. This streamlined access method provides precise control over permissions, ensuring secure and efficient collaboration. Through the intuitive ELEMENTS WebUI, administrators can grant or adjust workspace access permissions for individuals or groups in just a few clicks. Once permissions are set, users can instantly mount the workspace in the ELEMENTS Client, making data access effortless and secure.
Conclusion
ActiveScale is a powerful solution that provides outstanding data durability and innovative self-healing capabilities. These features simplify maintenance and make data loss nearly impossible. Perfect for organizations with extensive storage requirements, ActiveScale offers unmatched reliability and scalability.
The integration of this groundbreaking storage solution into the ELEMENTS platform enhances it with a robust workflow and collaboration layer tailored for Media and Entertainment workflows. Users can easily set up powerful automations, manage access permissions with precision, and utilize the Media Library for collaboration, sharing, rough-cutting, and editing. The integrated granular search function allows users to find the perfect footage effortlessly.
