Storage Networking Is in Focus at Broadcast Confab

The digital media industry is undergoing a data management crisis, and a slew of announcements at the National Association of Broacasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas this week take aim at the major challenges.

Notable news items include a partnership between Atrato and Seagate, which plan to deploy Seagate's hard disk encryption on Atrato's V1000 hardware. The two firms will target their joint solution at video-on-demand, media streaming, and editing applications in the data-intensive broadcast market .

Atrato, which emerged from stealth last month, is touting the V1000 as a low-cost, high-performance alternative to Solid State Disks (SSDs).

Atrato and Seagate announced their first customer at NAB this week: home theater specialist MusicGiants, which is using the solution to store digital content.

On another front, IBM unveiled a set of storage optimization services at NAB.The snappily titled Management Complexity Factor (MCRF) for Media essentially evaluates users' storage infrastructures. The service is built on IBM's acquisition of NovusCG for an undisclosed fee last year.

"Media companies are facing a double-edged sword with the exponential rise in digital media storage needs, coupled with concerns about optimizing storage to be more efficient," said Steve Canepa, IBM's vice president of media and entertainment, in a statement.

DataDirect Networks released two new models of its StorageScaler system: an integrated storage appliance and a larger networked storage system. The S2A6620 is a midrange system for DAS or Fibre Channel SAN deployment. (iSCSI, NAS, and InfiniBand support are planned for an unspecified time later this year.) The appliance is intended for use in rapid animation rendering, media asset management, and video editing (both SD and HD) -- as well as other kinds of enterprise apps.

DataDirect's goal is to offer a cheaper version of the vendor's larger-scale storage systems for rich media content: "What the S2A6620 is really about is giving mid-sized businesses the power to harness extreme storage functionality, once the domain of enterprise customers," said DataDirect CEO Paul Bloch in a statement. The S2A6620 comes with SAS/SATA drives that can be intermixed to a capacity of 120 Tbytes.

DataDirect's S2A9700 is also a SAS/SATA storage system with a maximum capacity of 1.2 Pbtyes, which supports InfiniBand and Fibre Channel as well as NAS. The system sports a dual active/active controller architecture and is designed for broadcasters, digital intermediate companies, and post production houses. The vendor claims that the S2A9700 offers 3 Gbytes/s throughput for reads and for writes, and that it will run multiple ingest/output streams without dropping frames. Like the S2A6620, the S2A9700 is scheduled to ship early in the third quarter, DataDirect says. The vendor won't release pricing.Rorke Data is previewing its Galaxy 3G hardware in Sin City this week, pushing the SAS/SATA array as way for users to store high-definition video.

The 16-Tbyte system can handle 1,000 Mbytes/s of data and six streams of uncompressed high-definition video images, according to Rorke Data.

Pricing information on the Galaxy 3G has not yet been released, although the vendor told Byte and Switch that the array's launch is imminent.

Rorke Data also took the wraps off two Blu-Ray and DVD devices at NAB this week. Pricing for the RDXRN50, which contains 500 Gbytes of internal disk storage and a single DVD burner, starts at $8,950, and the two-DVD, 100-disk RDXRPN100 starts at $11,950.

RAID specialist Infortrend is also busy in Las Vegas this week, demonstrating its EonStor S16F subsystem, which it says can support up to three streams of uncompressed high definition video.The device has been certified to work with Final Cut Pro editing software, as well as with AJA and Black Magic video I/O cards.

High-performance computing specialist SGI is using the NAB event to describe its role in Vanguard Animation's forthcoming Space Chimps movie, which used the vendor's Altix servers and Render Management software.

Space Chimps required some three Tbytes of data to be rendered each night, according to studio execs. "For five months we were running at 95 to 98 percent capacity and were able to get through 10,000 frames or 10,000 frame elements per evening," said co-producer Chris Auspurger in a statement. "That is very high throughput."

Another supplier, Omneon, announced that its storage systems, media servers, and transport gear have been picked by NBC for coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The vendor says the sports event is expected to generate over 3,000 hours of footage.

Key to Omneon's contribution is a file transport device called the Omneon ProCast CDN, designed to pipe images quickly over great distances. Omneon claims that ProCast enables a file that formerly took 30 hours to send via FTP to run over a 400 Mbit/s link to a waiting Omneon MediaGrid storage device in the U.S. in three minutes."Covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics requires us to capture every moment of every competition at every venue in China," said Dave Mazza, senior vice president, engineering, NBC Olympics, in a statement. "The solution involves a long distance file-based workflow which the Omneon MediaDecks [servers], the MediaGrids and the new WAN technology are all a key part of."

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