It’s good to see the annual broadcast conference, IBC in Amsterdam, back in its stride. During most of the five days, the aisles were busy in Hall 7, where content is created, re-created, managed and stored.
The topic of this year’s show was content creation in all its forms, from 3D capture and 4K workflows to the conversion of existing 2D content to 3D using some of the great editing and transformation tools being demonstrated. Add to that re-purposing for distribution to mobile phone networks and across the web, there’s nowhere for content management and storage to go but up.
For a while now, Quantum’s StorNext has been the storage management solution of choice for big projects in broadcast and post-production. StorNext offers a unique blend of high performance access to centralised content and long-term archive and protection of key digital assets.
The big news for Quantum at the recent IBC show was that StorNext is being offered in modular appliance form, allowing partners and end users to deploy the same scalable architecture more easily, more repeatedly and more cost effectively.
Tape still prevails in the large archives – giving orders of magnitude savings for both capital and operational expenditure, as well as footprint. New for the show Quantum announced even closer integration of their Scalar tape libraries with StorNext, providing easy-to-purchase seamless capacity growth (Archive Enabled Library) and extended data life management (EDLM).
EDLM works by checking the integrity of the tape media in the background, using all the parameters that LTO-5 tape can provide. Any suspect media is automatically retired after content is copied to new media by StorNext, all before any real data problems have arisen.
At Quantum’s IBC booth, we demonstrated the integration of StorNext, Cinegy Capture and AVID Interplay MAM, providing an ingest to archive proxy-based workflow with low res content being held on fast fibre channel disk and the same high res content held on LTO-5 tape in a Scalar library. Content was ingested into the Interplay MAM system and a rough cut edit was completed. Then this edit was passed via StorNext’s time-code-based partial file retrieval engine to supply the full resolution rough cut to an AVID craft edit system.
By using this proxy workflow with a StorNext tiered storage model only the required content is retrieved from the tape library, minimising the disk space required whilst maintaining an efficient workflow delivering content to the edit solution in a couple of minutes. With many broadcast archives now in the muli-petabyte range, and with the continuing repurposing of content, proxy based workflows are becoming more widespread.
In addition to the large broadcast workflows many post and production houses use StorNext. Once in place, the framework allows growth in performance and capacity to well beyond 3D and 6K requirements.
I’m looking forward to next year’s show, and wondering what new features of StorNext we’ll get to introduce then.
