Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/477832
6 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2015 STORAGE SOLUTIONS duplication, syndication and broadcast mastering; and complete audio services, including Foley and ADR/voi- ceover. About 18 months ago the company built a new facility and Rohde & Schwarz (www.rsa.rohde-schwarz. com) engineered a shared storage solution that primari- ly drives the restoration department. Roundabout uses Rohde & Schwarz Clipster DI workstations and Fuze Digital Cinema delivery systems throughout the facility. When it came time to invest in a new shared storage system, Roundabout chose Rohde & Schwarz to act as the single point for integrating the customized solution. It designed a system comprised of Quantum Corp. StorNext high-performance scaled stor- age and DataDirect Network arrays combined with the "secret sauce" of Rohde & Schwarz metadata control- lers and Spycer data management software for added reliability and longevity. "What makes the storage solution shine is Rohde & Schwarz's engineering team and support," says Ross Millward, Roundabout's director of IT and technical op- erations. "The system is sized appropriately for us and can grow with our needs. We're currently at about half a petabyte, but we can scale it infinitely by adding more of everything." Roundabout's restoration department is able to do five streams of uncompressed 4K simultane- ously off the shared storage "and it never hiccups," Millward reports. "We previously used a competitor's turnkey solution, but we needed more performance and more capacity." The company just finished remastering NYPD Blue to HDSR. The restoration department rescanned the series from film to 2K then handled the cleaning, restoration, color grading and finishing. "Everyone could work simultaneously; we didn't need multiple transfers and didn't have to move things around," says Millward. "The shared storage solution worked very efficiently." He notes that Roundabout ramped up its restoration and color grading capabilities when it moved to the new facility, hired experienced restoration staff and installed shared storage. "I can't imagine the resto- ration department taking off as it has without Rohde & Schwarz helping us create this shared storage solution," Millward says. DOT HILL Dot Hill's (www.dothill.com) AssuredSAN 4000 Series with the Ultra56 chassis is a high-density, high-per- formance, high-availability storage array with a small footprint. It features AssuredSAN 4004 controllers combined with the Ultra56 chassis; when outfitted with 56 3.5-inch large form factor 6TB drives, it can support 336sTB of raw capacity in a single chassis. But "what makes this system unique is its ability to intermix drives," says Jason Odorizzi, Dot Hill's director of strategic product marketing. "Ultra56 accepts not only large form factor devices, but also 2.5-inch devices, including both HDD and SSDs, so you can create differ- ent solutions within a single box." The result is the ability to run "significantly more" virtual machines than if the system used large form fac- tor drives exclusively. That means "you get more virtual machines for a much lower price point," Odorizzi notes. Dot Hill's 4000 Series of SAN storage arrays are powerful RAID data storage solutions, which can scale to over 1.4PBs of storage with additional expan- sion arrays. A dual redundant design eliminates single points of failure that can disrupt business operations. As- suredSAN arrays have dual active-active controllers for higher performance and failover, hot swappable drives, and dual power supplies and fans, all of which contrib- ute to proven 99.999 percent uptime. That translates to an average of less than 5:36 minutes of downtime annually. No wonder this family of products is a favorite for media and entertainment applications. "Depending on the codec you're using, a single chassis can support up to five simultaneous streams of 4K content in a system with 48 disk devices," says Jim Jonez, Dot Hill's vice president of marketing. The Ultra56 chassis is also a rugged, NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) Level-3 compliant box that better handles shock and vibration and keeps drives running cooler. The storage solution, which is shipping now, appeals to medium to large post production environments, says Jonez. "We're enjoying more and more success with the media and entertainment segment," he reports. "In the past, we've been known for our high-perfor- mance, high-availability solutions, and now we've added high-density capabilities — the ability to scale to a much larger capacity. "We made a strategic decision to pursue the media sector about three years ago, and we've seen our penetration increase, mostly among post production and content distribution, and our revenues increase," Jonez says. Dot Hill offers high-density solutions for post applications.