NAB 2016: DDN Storage Unveils MEDIAScaler 2.0

DataDirect Networks (SL8016) announced the availability of the new DDN MEDIAScaler Converged Media Workflow Storage Platform. MEDIAScaler 2.0 manages the complete workflow from ingest to archive and the cloud in a single, unified appliance.

Designed for use throughout post-production, broadcast and content delivery, the new MEDIAScaler delivers the power to accelerate highly concurrent media workflows, a wide range of media formats, and offers end-to-end digital content management from high performance ingest and processing to cloud collaboration and active archiving.

“Data rate is the biggest challenge in high-performance media workflows,” says Tom Coughlin, founder and lead analyst, Coughlin Associates. “The size of video frames are increasing due to higher resolutions such as 4K and 8K, high dynamic range (HDR), higher frame rates (HFR) and more cameras simultaneously capturing content per project. New format standards like IMF are creating more efficient distribution standards but require more metadata and customized content during production. To address these challenges, today’s media workflows require a data infrastructure that can manage every aspect of the media lifecycle coherently and offer the highest levels of performance. At the same time this infrastructure must be simple to install, configure and manage while delivering massive per client performance, supporting collaborative environments, content distribution and the latest processor and interconnect technologies. DDN’s MEDIAScaler 2.0 provides technological innovations for Media and Entertainment storage that will help customers meet their data growth, access and workflow challenges.”

With increased speed, density and scale, MEDIAScaler 2.0 builds on DDN’s award-winning MEDIAScaler platform and solves the ever-increasing data access challenges faced by high-performance media workflows. DDN MEDIAScaler 2.0 delivers a best-in-class solution that allows end-to-end media workflows to be managed within a single platform—across ingest, editing, transcoding, distributing, collaborating and archiving.  New MEDIAScaler 2.0 advantages include:

• World’s fastest converged platform for media workflows: new custom-designed hardware platform delivers 42 GB/s throughput for 40 concurrent uncompressed 4K streams on a single system;
• Supports industry’s latest high resolution formats: includes 4K, 8K UHD, HDR and IMF;
• Delivers full native performance from the latest SSD technologies:  NVMe and SAS SSD integrated by PCI-e fabric delivering low latency, high performance to embedded applications and file systems;
• Industry-leading density: up to 14 PB in one, 2-rack appliance; and
• Broad industry certifications: including Vizrt, SGI, Rohde & Schwartz, Dimension Data, Arris, Dalet and Tiger Technology.

With higher bandwidth than traditional scale-out NAS and a unified storage infrastructure that accelerates media applications that have historically been bottlenecked by traditional NAS performance, the new MEDIAScaler achieves unprecedented performance with up to 6GB/s throughput per media workload client, more than 40 concurrent uncompressed 4K streams on a single system and 800 percent faster ingest than its nearest competitor. It provides industry-leading density and massive scalability for core workflows, delivering 2x more density and 20x the scalability of its closest competitor for an all-in-one turnkey solution that overcomes scale, performance and cost hurdles.

“The demands of today’s media workflows are putting pressure on organizations to deploy high performance, scalable solutions that break down the bottlenecks and complexity of traditional NAS and scale out architectures for workflow management,” said Molly Rector, CMO, executive vice president product management and worldwide marketing, DDN. “DDN delivers innovative solutions tailor-made to support the unique needs of high-performance media workflows, including simplified management and collaboration.”