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Storage Supplement 2016

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7 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2016 STORAGE SOLUTIONS 2015 and NAB 2016, Small Tree (www.small-tree.com) has refreshed its entire shared storage line and added several new products. The popular TitaniumZ-5 portable unit, a five-drive system using software RAID, now supports 8TB drives so it can offer up to 40TBs of raw storage. News bu- reaus are avid fans of the TZ-5 storage solution, whose portability is also key for producers of live music and sporting events. Now shipping is the new TitaniumZ-5+, which builds on the capabilities of the TitaniumZ-5 by doubling the backplane performance from 3 to 6Gbs technology. "Its enhanced performance and 40TB storage capacity will satisfy a greater section of the market for live events, on-location and mobile production for documentaries," says Corky Seeber, president of Small Tree. The big news is the introduction of ZenStor, Small Tree's new primary storage line with 12-, 16- and 24-bay configurations. "We've completely overhauled and improved the shared storage OS, now using Linux," says Seeber. "There's a brand new and improved GUI with an emphasis on improved data protection. We are introducing for the first time the option for solid state drives in both hybrid or standalone options. The SSD configuration depends on how much SSD acceleration a customer needs." Seeber sees "a growing place for SSD in the media and entertainment market. SSD and 40Gb Ethernet are important elements to sustaining 4K workflows for clients," he points out. "SSDs offer significant perfor- mance improvements, are light weight, need less power to operate and generate less heat. Right now, they are expensive compared to traditional rotational disk drives, but the cost of ownership will continue to come down." Hybrid SSD configurations will be offered for the 12-, 16- and 24-bay ZenStor and TitaniumZ-5+ this spring. Small Tree also develops high-performance network- ing devices, and prides itself on its in-house Ethernet expertise as the industry migrates to Ethernet-based shared storage solutions. Seeber wonders where the quest for increasingly higher resolutions will end. "It drives technology de- velopments — SD to HD, HD to UHD; cameras that are capturing 5K, 6K and higher images. At what point will the human eye be unable to tell the difference?" DATADIRECT NETWORKS DataDirect Networks (www.ddn.com) will have a number of storage solutions in its booth at NAB 2016, but perhaps the one generating the most buzz is its MediaScaler High Performance Converged Media Stor- age Platform. It targets media customers with a single solution to manage end-to-end workflows — ingest, animation, rendering, transcoding, distributing, collaborating and archiving. Simple to install, config- ure and manage, MediaScaler is a turnkey product that overcomes the scale, performance and cost hurdles of traditional solutions. Shipping since second quarter 2015, MediaScaler is already in use at Red Bull Media House in Germa- ny, which operates some 20 edit suites for UHD broadcast and other post production workflows. They run a hybrid SSD-spinning disk solution that gives them best-of- both-worlds results: "Economy with no performance degradation," says Shreyak Shah, senior product and vertical marketing manager. Another product gaining a lot of momentum is WOS (Web Object Scaler), its revamped object storage solution. DDN has been a leader in object storage since 2008. WOS can manage trillions of objects with immutable data in a storage pool that scales uni- formly, simply and cost effectively, all in a single flat namespace. DDN's WOS offers massive scale and low latency for collaboration and global distribution to ar- chival media and the private and public cloud. A WOS storage cloud is built with WOS storage nodes; it's possible to deploy a fully-functional storage cloud with just one WOS node. "In the past two years there's been a massive in- crease in interest in Web object storage, and WOS is a true object storage solution with no file system beneath it," says Shah. About 99.999 percent of WOS storage is usable for content and media assets, he notes, com- pared to other systems with underlying file systems, which consume 15-20 percent of storage overhead. The Latency-Aware Access Manager feature main- tains a health map for all the nodes in WOS, which helps in quicker retrieval of objects stored in the cloud. WOS is the second-largest Web object storage solution, behind Amazon Web Services, with 360 billion objects to date. Among its early adopters are Deluxe's Efilm, which has 10PBs of WOS storage for distributing high resolution workflows from creative editors at multiple locations, and CPAC, the Canadian Cable Public Affairs Channel, which delivers stream- ing content to more than 11 million homes directly through WOS. Making its NAB debut is the DDN Life Cycle Manage- ment Solution, in software or a software-hardware combination, which "unifies namespaces across file and object, and brings a single view of your data wherever it resides, whether high performance, object or tape," Shah explains. "These solutions maximize the benefits of automated-tier storage without building silos." DDN's MediaScaler.

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