At NAB, we expect to see new storage solutions for 4K and higher resolution content, plus new cloud offerings for collaboration and archive. The question will be how much they disrupt the workflow. Will production teams have to change their day-to-day operations to use these technologies or will the technologies be seamlessly integrated?

What we don’t expect to see are solutions that fully address how to do heavy-duty re-monetization without slowing down content creation, particularly with high-resolution content. Most workflow storage cannot handle a mixed workload of transcoding, delivery and rendering operations while delivering the multiple streams of high-resolution needed for creating new content. 

We believe the answer is extending online storage with object storage technology and separating network traffic between content creation and re-monetization. Then the challenge becomes providing seamless access to your users and applications, and automating the migration between online and extended online so your staff isn’t additionally burdened.

Janet Lafleur is product marketing manager for the StorNext line at Quantum. Last year, she wrote about The Case for Object Storage.