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MillimeterNAB 2006
Jun 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Barry Braverman, S. D. Katz, D. W. Leitner, Steve Mullen, Dan Ochiva, Jan Ozer, and Jeff Sauer
Perspectives from the show floor
Avid Medéa VideoRAID RTR320
Store This
By Dan Ochiva
The storage market remains one of the most dynamic around. New, higher-capacity recording technology just keeps turning up, such as Seagate's April announcement of 750GB drives that employ the latest perpendicular recording technique.
Thomson Grass Valley, working with removable storage manufacturer Iomega, figured out how to incorporate Iomega's REV technology as a new recording medium for its Infinity Digital Media Camcorder and Infinity Digital Media Recorder. A Grass Valley REV PRO 35GB disk (GV made them a little sturdier and more dust-resistant) holds more than two hours of SD or 45 minutes of HD video with complete flexibility in the use of encoding and compression schemes.
Meanwhile, tech innovations contend with market consolidation for the top story of the day. Just after the show, Quantum — a Pick Hit winner for its SDLT 600A drive (see p. 84) — announced it would acquire Advanced Digital Information Corp. (ADIC), a competitor that makes a leading line of robotic tape storage devices. ADIC's StorNext product line provides users on Apple's Xsan network the ability to mix and match OSs to allow non-Apple clients on the SAN. Quantum began shipping a low-cost archive product for broadcasters earlier this year.
Consolidation doesn't end there. Over the past year, Avid bought Medéa, Ciprico bought Huge Systems, and Sun Microsystems bought StorageTek, another player in the post market.
Here's a look at some of Avid's storage moves. Avid has been criticized over the years for high-price points on its storage, but by buying Medéa, the company has gained one of the industry's low-cost leaders. Woodland Hills, Calif.-based Medéa gained its rep by turning out good product for the money, with prices that start in the low four figures — well below gear such as the facility-ready Avid Unity line of networked storage.
Omneon’s MediaGrid content storage system combines grid storage and grid computing to enable flexible, next-generation data management.
Debuting at the show, the Avid VideoRAID RTR320 and RTR320X are the first arrays of a planned build-out of low-cost parity RAID storage products that Avid will introduce over the next year to 18 months. The systems are built around five-drive and 10-drive storage arrays, respectively. Within each of those five-drive units, one of the disks functions as a parity drive. Some RAID levels suspend performance in the event of a drive failure, but parity arrays such as the Avid VideoRAID line deliver uninterrupted realtime performance — even during a drive rebuild. Available storage capacity ranges from 1.25TB to 5TB.
“If you can't beat 'em, have them join you” seems to be Avid's new stance in regard to storage. Avid's new “Open Storage Initiative” will allow most third-party Windows XP and Apple OS X apps (yes, that includes Final Cut Pro) to run on VideoRAID drives and Unity networked systems. Who says competitors can't be friends?
Known for its compact desktop drive arrays spec'd for standard NLE setups, G-Technology bumps things up with its G-Speed external RAID system. The 4Gbps Fibre Channel disk array features the latest trend in RAID for those who want the most security for their data — RAID Level 6. (RAID 6 strips data and parity across an array of drives like RAID 5, but calculates two sets of parity information for each parcel of data to improve fault tolerance.) With a claimed data rate of up to 250MBps, the G-Speed supports multistream SD and uncompressed HD, and features hot-swappable disk drive modules and fans and a redundant power supply option.
While it won't be relevant to smaller post operations, Omneon's MediaGrid active storage system is a vision of things to come. Touted as the first content storage system designed specifically for the demands of working with large digital media files, the MediaGrid employs some of the latest trends in computer technology, including grid storage and grid computing. By combining multiple storage servers — Omneon describes them as “intelligent, interconnected-yet-independent” in operation — the new system is said to greatly enhance the efficiency of digital media access for users and applications throughout the entire broadcast process.
MediaGrid's architecture has similarities to Isilon's modular design approach for large data systems, where each storage component is also a media-processing engine. Both systems also employ industry-standard components and connectivity to create highly configurable, cost-effective arrays. Marrying intelligence with a storage array also increases total throughput as each unit is added, since large files are split down further as each new array comes on line.
While you won't be buying intelligent storage arrays for your facility from HP or Dell anytime soon, combining processing power and storage directly into modular units makes sense in an increasingly networked world.
Studio Network Solutions might be tucked away in St. Louis, and not Silicon Valley, but the small company keeps coming up with innovative storage solutions that keep the company in the thick of the action. Postmap is a good example. While you might want a more powerful search tool that can look over a network, DAM (digital asset management) apps can be expensive and complex to implement. Meanwhile, most OS-based search tools can't move beyond desktop searches. Postmap can locate, tag, and track media files and associated metadata whether on a SAN or LAN, or located remotely, offline, or on removable storage like CDs and DVDs. It works with both Mac OS X and Windows networked systems.
The key to successfully pulling off advanced search, of course, is to spend the time to create and attach metadata that describes and classifies specific files and folders. Custom tagged info reduces search times, allowing you to share production notes and better organize critical files.
To comment on this article, email the Digital Content Producer editorial staff at dcpfeedback@prismb2b.com.>
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