Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/799353
STORAGE SOLUTIONS FACILIS Last year, an emerging storage industry trend ap- peared to be finding the optimal way to approach SSD technology for media and entertainment. But James McKenna, vice president of marketing and pre-sales support at Facilis (www.facilis.com), observes that, "SSD is still the performance leader, but hasn't followed Moore's Law of the spinning disk. Enterprise SSD prices are still high and capacity hasn't taken a big jump forward." On the other hand, "hard drives keep getting better generation after generation, so rumors of their death have been greatly exaggerated. Customers can now gain increased performance with hard drives with- out reinvesting in new SSD technology." A prime example of this is the Facilis Hub Server, which will make its debut at NAB. It uses a new architecture to optimize the hard drives and create bandwidth from standard Facilis Terra- Block storage systems. "It aggregates the speed of multiple drive groups and offloads some of the processing duties to create greater performance than the servers can normally generate," McKenna explains. "The resulting speeds compare well against the SSD-based systems, albe- it within a larger form factor." Some Terra- Block owners who add the Hub can expect to double or triple their available performance, he reports. "We identified limitations in the traditional archi- tecture and knew it couldn't be overcome without a change in hardware, but we didn't want to obsolete existing TerraBlock customers. We had to quite literally think outside the box and add a new component to the configuration, and that is the Hub server," says McKenna. "The resulting solution is affordable and powerful for existing users. Cost per video stream drops substantially when adding the Hub server alone or in addition to a capacity upgrade." A trend he sees continuing is IT convergence. Facilis product family www.myavidrental.com 888-858-4180 Call Toll Free • Avid ISIS / NEXIS • Media Composer & Symphony • Avid Desktops, Laptops, iMacs • EVS & Mobile Unit Integration • Certified Technical Support • Worldwide, Long and Short Term • Gena • Genarts Sapphire Dongle Rentals Broadcast Events • Film • Reality TV • Corporate AVID RENTALS SHARED STORAGE AND EDITING SYSTEMS