NAB Show 2026: Quantum Responds to Industry-Wide Supply Chain and Power Disruption Ahead

Quantum Corp. highlighted its solutions designed to address AI-driven supply chain and power challenges arising from surging costs, constrained availability, and supply uncertainty for flash and hard disk technologies.Ahead of the 2026 NAB Show, Quantum has introduced “shockproof workflows,” architectures intended to mitigate those vulnerabilities with available solutions that enable relief from energy constraints, lower storage costs, and support hardware-level cyber-resilience that traditional flash and hard-drive only solutions can’t deliver. These workflows are anchored by the company’s Quantum ActiveScale object storage platform with integrated cold storage and the Quantum Scalar i7 tape library, built to hyperscaler specifications.

“Shift happens,” said Hugues Meyrath, CEO, Quantum. “It’s been a time of extraordinary change for media and content producers worldwide – and threats to ‘business-as-usual’ storage and workflow assumptions are here to stay. Most organizations that depend on flash or hard drive-only solutions are facing the need to urgently review their architectures and ask hard questions: where is my supply chain exposure, how do I contain spiking flash costs, how do I inoculate my workflows against the next disruption? These customers need actionable answers now, and an architecture that’s ready for what’s next – and we are ready with workflows designed to be shockproof, built by Quantum.”

With global semiconductor fabrication capacity oversubscribed through 2028 and new data center power demands at unprecedented levels, the need for AI infrastructure is seriously challenging component availability at affordable prices. The AI infrastructure influence puts even traditional but fundamental workflow and storage decisions in jeopardy. In addition, public cloud customers in search of sovereignty over their workflows, independence from volatile cloud economics, and agency over their data architecture are looking for answers that their teams can manage in their own facilities.

In this environment , tape has reemerged as a critical and strategic technology to store even the largest content and preservation archives at reduced cost. LTO-10 cartridges now deliver up to 40TB of native capacity, and tape drives such as those found in Quantum’s Scalar tape libraries offer speeds exceeding 400 megabytes per second with AES-256 hardware encryption. Tape systems consume dramatically less power: IEEE research documents a 97% reduction in carbon footprint per terabyte compared to hard disk drives. Tape also provides a hardware air gap that no network-connected storage medium can match: a cartridge in a vault is unreachable by ransomware, firmware exploits, or supply-chain attacks.

Quantum is bringing its technical and workflow experts to NAB 2026, from April 19-22, Booth N1726, to work directly with media and entertainment professionals on their most pressing infrastructure questions. Quantum’s team will be available to discuss and architect shockproof workflows featuring:

• ActiveScale with ActiveScale Cold Storage: the only object storage platform with integrated, single-namespace tape as a seamless cold tier, effectively delivering on-premises cold storage economics without egress fees or cloud lock-in
• Scalar i7 RAPTOR: built to hyperscaler specifications in a highly modular, scalable architecture accessible to organizations of any size. The same tape library engineering trusted by the world’s largest data operators, available to mid-market production houses and enterprise data centers alike
• Quantum StorNext: the file system and storage management platform purpose-built for high-performance workflows, orchestrating data movement across flash, disk, object, and tape tiers so content is always where it needs to be. Warm when you need it, cold when you don’t, and cost sensitive to what the access pattern demands

Quantum’s technical experts at NAB will be available to address the full range of workflow challenges facing media production teams, from architecting around the current HDD and flash supply volatility, to designing content lifecycle strategies that eliminate unnecessary cloud spend, to building ransomware-resilient archive tiers that protect content libraries and ensure long-term content preservation at any scale.