10/10 for effort....
...but minus several million for it still being a storage story.
Pot plant surveillance cameras in a Colorado marijuana farm feeding Quantum’s StorNext multi-tiered and scale-out, file virtualisation and data services software with video footage show the substantial market changes to which Quantum is having to adapt. CEO Jon Gacek told a visiting press crew in December: “I feel like the …
Aye, it didn't spend long describing the needs of the new breed of marijuana farm that has sprung up since its legalisation in several states.
Their stock control software could make an interesting article; the licences given to weed producers require that every gram has to be accounted for (for tax and other reasons). However, weed will lose mass (through evaporation) during the curing process, so the stock control software has to be able to account for this.
Cause that sounds like quite an impressive achievement.
As for archive tapes being more valuable than new I'll be the NSA and GCHQ can confirm the truth of that.
People think "the cloud" will end tape but that's marketing BS. Actual big cloud operators know that disks (spinning rust and flash) will fill their data centres and still people will want more, but accept some access delays.
Just like mainframe operators discovered about 4 decades ago.
And just like them Quantum have discovered people don't want to think about what level the data is at, they just want it.
Frankly I'm amazed all storage operators don't do this.
The fact so many of them are in financial trouble suggests most don't.
The broad issue in selling storage for video surveillance is the incredibly long sales cycle; a lot of deals take 12 -18 months to close and there is a race to the bottom with pricing. Few storage vendors (or their salespeople) have the stomach for that.
On the other hand, what I thought this article was going to go into is how Colorado and other places have codified seed-to-sale video surveillance and multiple months of needing to retain that data. The combination of specific regulations, long retention periods, real audits and compliance checking represent an opportunity not just for storage, but for service assurance, IoT, and other physical security technologies. Video surveillance is often run in very shoddy ways (many reports of less than 70% uptime), so legal weed might be one of the few places where real IT skills and technology are wanted in physical security.
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Could Quantum be risking Federal liability, or even massive asset forfeiture to the profit of the Trump administration, by advertising their products for something that while claimed to be legal by the states, is still a Federal felony to produce?
Or is this story just the product of creative journalism?