#ibc2015

The 2015 Multiscreen Salon once again showed that an intimate setting combined with top notch industry experts, innovative startups and a lively crowd made for a very interesting afternoon. With keynotes and showcases the latest on sports, entertainment and multiscreen video distribution it was an excellent opportunity to learn, and mingle. Our distinguished speakers spoke on a variety of subjects from business intelligence to bringing talent and interactivity to a multiscreen world:

Data for business intelligence in sport; Mark Lichtenhein, PGA European Golf Tour

Enhancing sports broadcast with virtual studio and live data; Olek Loewenstein, Univision Communications Inc. USA

Best practices from the Interactive Emmys: getting the audience involved; John Canning, New Media Council Board of the Producers Guild, Co Chair of the Motion Picture Technology Committee, Executive Committee member of the Interactive Peer Group of the TV Academy

Social TV Advertising case from Norwegian supermarket COOP; Jonas Aakre, PHD agency

How to create a success with a horizontal app approach in a smaller market like Portugal; Vitor J. Rodrigues, TVI Portugal

How Endemol Shine is evolving from TV production to bringing talent, digital video and interactivity to a multiscreen world; Jurian van der Meer, Endemol Shine

Crowd based real time reporting of big live events; Daniel Blokmaker, Ubideo

Predictions for the near future; Seth Shapiro, author, two-time Emmy award winner and USC professor

In part 1 we discussed some of the hottest storage offerings in the online/nearline disk category. As we continue on our way through what we learned at IBC we see a wider range of low cost storage media, as well as some denser storage media options as well.

Lower Cost Shared Storage Options

A number of vendors are providing a lower-cost shared storage option. This enables smaller post-production facilities and organizations avail the same enterprise features of more expensive storage solutions.

Image: Avid ISIS 1000

Avid showcased the Avid ISIS 1000, the smallest brother of the highly successful Avid ISIS shared storage solution. The ISIS 1000 scales from 20 TB up-to 80 TB, is 4K ready, sustains performance of up-to 1.2 GB/s and supports all editorial solutions with a completely open file-system.  You can learn more here.

Image: Promax Platform

Promax made quite a statement with their Platform product line and called out the “Avid ISIS 1000” to the mat with this statement.

Promax Platform does come across as a feature rich, highly capable storage solution that goes beyond just shared editing. It is possibly the most “workflow integrated” storage solution on the market.

Facilis was also showcasing their Terrablock 8D - a lower cost offering of the larger 24D systems, but featuring FC performance, shared editing and project sharing features.

Denser Storage Options

Another interesting trend was that of high density Nearlines. With the introduction of higher capacity hard drives that features green, spin-down technology with improved cooling, storage array vendors are able to pack more into a chassis.

Image: EMC Isilon HD Active Archive series

Isilon showcased the HD series solution targeted specifically at active archival. A single chassis holds 354 TB and can scale up to 50.9 PB in a single file-system. These solutions are designed to provide a replacement for traditional LTO tape based systems. However, a critical aspect provided by LTO is the ability to externalize, shelf and re-use. This is something that RAID based disk archive systems cannot provide

*However, a critical aspect provided by LTO is the ability to externalize, shelf and re-use. This is something that RAID based disk archive systems cannot provide.

Image: Imation/Nexsan E-Series

Another solution on display was the Imation/Nexsan E-series high-density storage solution. The E60VT can pack a whopping 480 TB in a single chassis. It also features MAID technology that can auto spin-down drives when not in use. However, while the Isilon solution is a NAS based solution, the E60VT is a SAS, FC or iSCSI based storage rack.

Object Storage

While object storage is not a new category, we mention it here as a reminder due to the importance it can play in the media vertical. Object storage fits remote collaboration and cloud workflows extremely well – both of which are seeing a steady increase in media workflows.

Quantum highlighted its object storage solution: Lattus. Along with Lattus, Quantum showcased Artico – a NAS designed for archival and nearline. Artico, which comes populated with disk storage, can use Lattus as an offload tier along with tape and Q-cloud. 

DDN (Data Direct Networks) was demonstrating their WOS object storage solution. The WOS solution can hold up to 768 TB in a 5u chassis, can scale up to 256 nodes in a single cluster and supports NFS, CIFS and the regular cloud access protocols (S3, SWIFT).

*Confused by Object Storage? Subscribe to our 3-Part Article in October: What is Object Storage?

Conclusions

As we see a massive increase in content resolution, we are seeing new performance challenges in how this content is offloaded, ingested, transcoded, edited, finished and archived. It however seems like SSD based storage, more cost effective editing storage, higher density Nearline storage are all innovations in the right direction to help the customer deal with this content tsunami!

At IBC 2015, we took the opportunity to learn more about some of the newest and hottest storage offerings in the online/nearline disk category. This write-up highlights some of the solutions that we thought were standouts at the show.

The Highlights

This year at IBC there were some clear themes worth noting in the area of drive based storage.

SSDs

Lower Cost Shared Storage Options

Denser Storage Options

Object Storage

Mentioned vendors include:

Avid

Data Drive Pool (DDP)

Data Direct Network (DDN)

Facilis

Imation/Nexsan

Isilon

Promax

Quantum

The Details

SSD

SSDs are all the rage in the enterprise IT market. This is largely due to their ability to deliver phenomenal IOPS over spinning disk. As IT performance tends to remain largely IOPS based driven by database loads and virtual machine environments, this has been a major driving force in IT.

But do SSDs make sense for Media? Absolutely!

SSDs also deliver phenomenal streaming and bandwidth performance. A single SSD can deliver the streaming performance of multiple spinning drives. Traditionally, customers have been forced to buy additional disks just to get more bandwidth. With the demands of 4K pipelines where offloading, low-res creation and ingest can all be happening from the same storage system, SSD stand to make a real mark.

Image: micro-DDP SSD system from Data Drive Pool

DDP (Dynamic Drive Pool) is an iSCSI based SAN and custom file-system solution. DDP was demonstrating their mini and micro DDP storage systems. These are pure SSD based systems that can deliver phenomenal performance.

Image: micro-DDP SSD system sustaining 1.5GB/s of performance

The micro-DDP weighed in at just under 6kgs, half-depth, 1u rackmount and capable of delivering more than 1.5 GB/s or 12 Gb/s – the bandwidth performance equivalent of 15 regular spinning disks! This tiny box can be hand carried and sustain multiple parallel tasks such as offloading, ingesting, transcoding – right in the field!

Image: Facilis storage solutions

Facilis was also demonstrating their hybrid SSD and spinning disk solution. The Facilis solution is not designed to be a compact SSD offering (like the micro-DDP) but rather is unique in its ability to offer SSD volumes and spinning disk volumes in the same storage solution. This fits extremely well with 4K workflows, where high-resolution tasks such as offloading, ingest, transcoding and finishing can occur from SSD volumes while HD or low-res edits can occur from spinning disk volumes.