Quantum Announces the H4000 Essential – Asset Management and Collaborative Storage Built for Small, Independent Creative Teams

Quantum announced the release of the H4000 Essential, an all-in-one appliance that integrates Quantum CatDV media asset management and Quantum StorNext 7 shared storage software on the award-winning H4000 storage platform. The H4000 Essential provides highly available shared storage and automatic content indexing, discovery, and workflow collaboration for small creative teams. It does not require specialized IT skills to support, can be up and running in minutes, and offers unique features that integrate media management and storage so these teams can spend more time creating and less time searching for content. Now for the first time, the same technologies used by the largest studios, broadcasters, and post-production houses are available to small creative teams everywhere, starting at an entry-level suggested retail price under $40,000.

“What’s remarkable about the new H4000 Essential is that we’ve brought the most important capabilities of two powerful platforms – CatDV and StorNext – and taken away the complexity and time in configuring and managing them separately and setting up production workflows. The H4000 Essential is the fastest solution to stand up for a new project or a new team – whether working directly on the storage, collaborating remotely from the field, managing multiple projects simultaneously, or all the above,” said Dave Clack, vice president and general manager, Cloud Software and Analytics, Quantum. “For the first time, these industry-leading technologies are in reach of small creative groups everywhere.”

“Switch is a fast-moving, agile brand and experience agency for leading content and enterprise brands – our work bridges digital and brand marketing with virtual and hybrid meeting events, tradeshows, and field marketing. We have multiple projects in flight constantly across our team, so it’s important to us to have an all-in-one content management and storage solution like the H4000 Essential for our fast-moving deliverables,” said Darren Temple, CEO and president of Switch.

The H4000 Essential features are purpose-built for the needs of small, independent creative teams and include:

• StorNext collaborative shared storage systems of starting at either 48TB or 96TB of raw storage in a compact 2U server, expandable up to 384TB with purchase of additional storage
• A highly-available dual-controller architecture
• An intuitive out of the box user experience designed for creative professionals to get up and running quickly
• 25GbE networking connection to customer networks
• Unified StorNext and CatDV account creation with StorNext-powered SMB storage volume sharing
• StorNext shared storage operations to trigger file ingesting, metadata extraction, proxy and filmstrip creation without needing ‘file tree polling’
• Automatic content ingest, metadata extraction, proxy, thumbnail, and filmstrip creation
• Automatic content cataloging and indexing based on folder structure, made immediately available to all users
• Highly efficient StorNext and CatDV integration to avoid file system polling that can impact performance
• Quantum CatDV pre-installed and pre-configured for use by up to 10 named users, including use of Adobe Premiere Pro CatDV Panel
• Integration with Quantum Cloud-Based Analytics (CBA) software for remote, proactive system monitoring
• Available archiving plugins for Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, or choice of S3-compatible storage

The available archive plugins are a powerful way to extend CatDV’s searchable catalog as projects are completed and moved to cloud storage, yet keep them available for fast recall as needed on the H4000 Essential:

“We love empowering agile, creative teams with cloud storage that delivers ease, flexibility, and immediate availability when they need it. Pairing the H4000 Essential’s impressive feature set with the Backblaze B2 Archive plugin does just that—it lets customers grow and protect archives at any scale while maintaining visibility into all the content they have stored on Backblaze B2 via the powerful visual catalogs the UI provides,” said Nilay Patel, vice president of sales and partnerships at Backblaze.

“We’re impressed with how fast it is to get a fully configured and integrated instance of StorNext-powered shared storage and Quantum CatDV up and running” said Nick Smith, vice president technology, Exertis Broadcast. “We see H4000 Essential as a powerful way to get world-class tools in the hands of content teams across our nationwide network of value-added resellers.”