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MillimeterEdit Expertise: Storage Savings
Feb 18, 2009 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
As the economy stalls, companies drop prices on storage and compression gear.
A budget-friendly storage system such as Maxx Digital’s Final Share SAN might be entry-level, but features do include 8TB of storage, a Gigabit Ethernet (GE) card, and a GE switch.
Workaday products such as disk arrays for video editing, or related technology such as codec cards, are as integral to video production as new HD cameras and editing applications; they're just not as sexy. Moving your video on and off storage is a key to editing, while transcoding makes your project available for DVD, web, and cell phone distribution.
The steady if quiet success of drive makers such as Seagate Technology or Western Digital isn't headline material. That industry improves according to a metric that's similar to micro-processing's Moore's Law. For much of the past decade, that's worked out to storage capacity doubling every 18 months for equal dollar value.
The progress of compression and transcoding technology looks to be just as dull (and successful), with comparable gains through improved algorithms and savvy electronics design. You rarely read headlines about it, but this crucial technology helps transmit video over the Web and deliver Blu-ray Discs to Wal-Mart.
If you buy a disk array today, you're benefitting from the blistering speed of technology changes. In July 2002, Avid Technology announced Avid Unity LANshare EX v3.0. Described by the company as the industry's most cost-effective shared-storage system, this basic Fibre Channel (FC)-connected 2TB unit cost $40,000. Today, CalDigit sells its HDPro — a 2TB SAN-ready storage subsystem capable of a claimed 400MBps throughput — for $3,995.
In the current economy, that steady downward trend in prices might not be enough for video professionals who need to upgrade their infrastructures. But if you're still planning to put together a storage system for post-production or investing in compression gear, your bottom line might be in luck. I recently polled a representative sample of storage and compression manufacturers and resellers. Some companies have cut prices in direct response to current economic woes, while others promote new technologies that are more cost-effective than older solutions.
Aware of trim budgets, Atto Technology reduced the cost of its line of Celerity 8Gbps FC HBAs and doubled the performance of the older 4Gbps cards.
Atto Technology
If you want to save money by building your own direct-attached storage system, for example, start with the heart of any good setup — the host bus adapter (HBA) that sits in your workstation.
One longtime supplier, Atto Technology, shows that nimble vendors — aware of the cratering of budgets — realize they need to pull down prices, even on the highest-end gear.
This past September, the Amherst, N.Y.-based company announced it was delivering its initial generation of 8Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs, some of the first such high-speed HBAs to come to market.
These Celerity-branded 8Gbps FC cards double the performance of today's top-level 4Gbps products while maintaining full backward compatibility with the large installed base of 4Gbps and 2Gbps FC gear. They also make use of Atto's ADS (Advanced Data Streaming) technology, which is claimed to improve I/O.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.