Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1100395
2 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MAR/APR 2018 STORAGE SOLUTIONS As the size of video files increase performance becomes more important. Moving into multi-channel raw 4K and even 8K video post production, storage performance requirements exceed the capability of HDD-only storage systems. Solid state storage is becoming part of many video workflows. Storage device and storage system manu- facturers have developed a new interface for solid state drives — Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) that is designed to bring the internal capabilities of flash memory chips to the PCIe bus. NVMe doesn't have the legacy overhead of SATA and SAS interfaces, allowing a significant performance improvement. Although NVMe SSDs are more expensive than SATA or SAS drives today, in volume they will drop in price and become a ubiquitous element in modern storage systems. (Figure 2 shows a Samsung NVMe M.2 form factor SSD.) The NVM Express working group has also devel- oped standards to support the protocol in a network fabric, initially for fibre channel and infiniband, but more recently on Ethernet. Many storage system companies are developing NVMe fabric storage networks. Western Digital even introduced a storage chassis full of HDDs with NVMe over fabric on the back of the system (part of their OpenFlex compos- able infrastructure). NVMe looks like it is poised to become the pre- dominant storage interface in the next few years. While today NVMe access is mostly storage based (file or block) there are software stacks that could allow direct memory-like access for NVMe storage and computing systems. This will be especially useful with very fast emerging non-volatile memory technologies that could replace traditional volatile memories. NVMe is moving us closer to a more memory-centric computing architecture that could transform rendering and other video production tasks requiring high resolution and high frame rate. Flash memory and other solid state storage will play an increasing role in M&E storage in future years, although HDDs and magnetic tape will play an import- ant role for lower cost bulk storage of media content. In particular, we expect the use of SSDs in post-pro- duction to increase significantly in the next few years. (Figure 3 shows our projections for flash memory revenues in 2023 for various M&E applications.) Some addition observations from the M&E sur- vey are that in 2018, for content delivery networks (CDNs), about 39 percent of the survey partici- pants reported that flash memory is used in their edge servers. STORAGE DEMAND FOR POST PRODUCTION Post production storage demand will increase in future years with more multi-camera, 360-degree projects, higher resolutions, more bits per frame and higher frame rates. This will drive overall storage requirements as shown in Figure 4. As shown in the