By Tom Coughlin

Welcome to the second part of our coverage of digital storage technology for media and entertainment. Last time we looked hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs), media cards and related solutions and archiving products, many of which were introduced at NAB 2022. For this installment we will focus on developments in storage systems, storage software and cloud storage for media and entertainment applications. Post production, including video editing, is a major driver for various M&E storage offerings.

Let’s look at our projections for digital storage for post production.

Post Storage Demand
Demand for storage in post production is increasing thanks to more multi-camera, 360-degree projects; higher resolutions; more bits per frame; and higher frame rates. This drives overall storage requirements, as in the graph below.

Companies providing storage systems for local storage for M&E applications include G-Tech (WDC), LaCie (Seagate), OWC, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba.  Companies providing storage systems and software for network storage (besides those mentioned above) include AIC, Asustor, Avid, CineRAID, Facilis, MagStor, OpenDrives, Pixitmedia, Promise, QNAP, Rocstor, Stardom and TrueNAS.

Storage Solutions at NAB 2022
OpenDrives unveiled its open ecosystem solution at the 2022 NAB Show. The company says that “powered by Atlas, the centralized hub for accessing, managing and moving data with a single pane of glass, the solution bridges software, hardware and services to provide workflow solutions that are flexible, modular and scalable, and fully agnostic.” OpenDrives is working with partners such as Creative Mobile Solutions (CMSI), EVS, Western Digital and Signiant.

Fox Sports

According to OpenDrives, users, such as Fox Sports experienced “a 3X throughput rate when switching to an open ecosystem for NASCAR 2021.” Most recently, Fox Sports implemented the open ecosystem for the United States Football League reboot. The figure hereshows the Fox News NASCAR field operations layout.

OpenDrives storage solutions include Atlas Core, the underlying software system that’s revolutionizing multi-vendor, multi-cloud solutions with a seamless framework that connects partner solutions quickly and simply, and Ultra Hardware Platform, the built-for-live-broadcast, network-attached-storage solution that provides scale-up and scale-out capabilities to match individual complexities and performance demands with a much smaller form factor. Hybrid Cloud, Atlas and Ultra are all powered by the open and agnostic ecosystem. Atlas can now manage OpenDrives’ own Atlas Cloud Plus and AWS storage, with future support for Google Cloud Platforms and Azure services.

Quantum had a large area in the North Hall, where I spoke with them about the company’s latest products. These included the latest generation of its F-Series portfolio with the release of the Quantum F2100 NVMe storage appliance. The new system provides faster performance and more NVMe storage capacity than previous generations. The company said that the F2100 can “leverage the speed and parallel processing power of NVMe to speed up production workflows, rendering and video and image processing.”  This 24-drive-array product offers up to 737TB of raw NVMe storage and up to 50GB/s for multi-client reads with eight 100GbE ports or 16 ports of 32Gb Fibre Channel.

Quantum

The F2100 ships with the latest Quantum block storage software, which introduces a unified user experience across F-Series NVMe storage and H-Series SSD/HDD storage, with many new features to give users more flexible configuration options and better reporting and monitoring. The F2100 is fully integrated with Quantum Cloud-Based Analytics (CBA) software for proactive system monitoring, and Quantum customers can now access these customer applications using the MyQuantum service delivery platform that was recently announced.

Additionally, Quantum said that pros can also use the Quantum StorNext 7 “file system pools” feature to create drive volumes composed of the F2100 and spinning disk volumes to fine-tune their workflow storage for performance, capacity and cost, all under a single StorNext 7 namespace.

Vast

Quantum also announced the release of the H4000 Essential, an all-in-one appliance that integrates Quantum CatDV media asset management and Quantum StorNext 7 shared storage software on the H4000 storage platform. The H4000 Essential provides a 2U server with 48TB or 96TB of raw highly available shared storage and automatic content indexing, discovery and workflow collaboration for small creative teams with 25GbE networking. Additional storage systems can expand this to 384TB. The product starts at $40,000.

Vast showed me its latest all-flash hardware using AIC enclosures. Vast says its products help studios and visual effects houses to consolidate their production and archive requirements into a single, easy-to-manage namespace that can scale to exabytes — all while supporting hundreds of 4K video streams or high-scale rendering requirements. Note that AIC had an exhibit with lots of storage boxes containing its GRAID, a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe and NVMe-oF RAID card.

EditShare was showing its new EFS 60NL, which provides 60 drive bays in 4U of rack space. The company’s EFS Multi-Site allows users with multiple locations to leverage built-in file acceleration to synchronize project storage between EFS clusters in different facilities so they have ready access to content.

I met Ciphertex at the show, which specializes in providing secure, encrypted portable storage solutions. Ciphertex products are designed and manufactured in the USA. The Ciphertex SecureNAS CX-160KHD can store up to 320TB and is powered by a CX-Linux ZFS operating system.

Ciphertex

For selected cybersecurity, it implements Ciphertex Protect, a proprietary hardware encryption key to protect sensitive information from digital attacks. CX-Linux ZFS provides triple redundancy backup, simplifies the data management process for greater efficiency and allows administrators to manage SecureNAS appliances in local, virtual and remote environments.

GB Labs was showing its Space and Space+ storage appliance with other workflow tools and with its FastNAS Generation 2 platform, which offers network delivery performance up to 4Gb/s. GB Labs also offers its Unify Hub software platform that bridges on-prem and cloud storage. It is targeted to enable remote production with data integrity and security.

Promise Technology was showing its VTrak N-series and said that the Pegasus32 supports the Mac Studio. According to the company, “The VTrak N-Series is a NAS storage with performance optimization and file-sharing for rich media and production teams, perfect for collaborative workflow features on Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X, Autodesk Flame and other pro editing software. It offers teams the options for either 10G or 25G ports, with 10G Ethernet connecting shared asset storage to team workstations.”

Promise

In addition, the N-Series installs high-performance NVMe for caching or tiering using either FileBoost or TierBoost technology to maximize storage performance. These high-performance specifications are packaged together with intuitive and simple user interfaces for data administration and rich media team access.

I met with the company Nyraid, a new storage startup. It offers an UltraIO block-based storage system built with erasure codes. They use GPUs to generate the erasure code for the block storage. With data spread throughout the system HDDs, many more drives can fail than with conventional RAID systems. The UltraIO system supports block, file and object data types in a single system. The technology was originally developed in Australia for storing data for the long baseline array

Storage Made Easy announced a partnership to combine Object Matrix’s object storage with SME’s Enterprise File Fabric. The partnership is said to provide a media-friendly and user-friendly federated storage platform through which users can quickly find, edit and transfer assets to and from MatrixStore, legacy file systems and public cloud storage and securely share with external partners.

ATTO

According to SME, “The Enterprise File Fabric data management platform provides file services on top of object and presents a single-pane-of-glass namespace across MatrixStore and other on-premises and cloud storage, irrespective of whether they are file- or object-based. Users can easily access media and other assets stored in any location as well as quickly transfer data between them.” SME also said the File Fabric’s accelerated file transfer feature, M-Stream, and other media-aware features — including web-based video previewing/scrubbing with ProRes and MXF support and automated or one-click transcoding and AI-integrated content transcription — can enable media organizations to unlock more value from their global media portfolio.

ATTO Technology showed its network and storage connectivity products (HBAs and SmartNICs) at NAB. ATTO products are enabled with Advanced Data Streaming (ADS), which manages latency to provide controlled acceleration for smoother data streaming in high-bandwidth applications, such as video workloads. One of the ADS features is Bus Mastering, which eliminates the need for communicating with the host CPU by transferring data directly between the ATTO host adapter and system memory. This relieves the CPU from the burden of managing protocol activities and increases system bandwidth for other applications. Another feature is Tagged Command Queuing, which allows for multiple I/O commands to be processed in any order, improving overall performance of read and write requests to hard drives.

ATTO also showed its XstreamCore ET 8200 intelligent bridges and its new ExpressNVM S48F Smart NVMe Switch Host. The ATTO 360 tuning, monitoring and analytics software for Ethernet storage networks was also on display.

SNS

SNS was showcased its EVO shared storage server in multiple form factors for media teams of all sizes.  The EVO suite is a collection of software tools meant to improve creative collaboration and productivity and is included with EVO products.

Viking Enterprise Solutions (VES), a product division of Sanmina, announced a flexible storage alternative to public cloud solutions based on a cloud-native and object- and file-storage architecture. The image below is the Viking solution in a rack, shown in the Stream Station booth in the West Hall. The system used Toshiba HDDs with 192TB native with 135TB useable. The system is called Cloud Native Obsidian, which is available through Stream Station and VES distribution partner Climb Channel Solutions.

Viking

Scale Logic launched its media-focused Object Storage and Private Cloud platform, powered by Object Matrix. The company says, “With its active archiving functionality for long-term data retention, the solution enables users to offload, migrate, store and centralize files from various sites within a less expensive secondary tier. This functionality frees up valuable space while decreasing costs and the need for additional IT resources. Moreover, its many security features ensure controlled access and protect against threats resulting in data loss. The solution also includes built-in support for WORM and S3 object-locking to enable continuous data integrity.”

SANs Digital was showing its AccuRAID iSCSI and Fibre Channel SAN 1 and 5 Series Dual-Active SAN systems at NAB. The products include thin provisioning, SSD read and write cache, auto tiering and snapshots.

QNAP showcased various storage solutions, including a Thunderbolt 4 NAS. Products on display included the company’s TVS-hxx88X desktop NAS (powered by Intel Xeon W-1250) for videographers; TDS-h2489FU, all-flash NVMe NAS with dual Intel Xeon Silver 4300 processors and 25GbE connectivity for M&E production; and the TS-464T4 Thunderbolt 4 NAS.

QNAP

According to the QNAP, “the TS-464T4 features a powerful Intel Celeron N5105 quad-core processor, dual-port Thunderbolt 4, native 2.5GbE/10GbE connectivity and two M.2

NVMe PCIe slots, providing storage for high-speed media editing and file sharing. It enables the ultimate visual experience with HDMI 2.0 output (4K at 60Hz) and real-time transcoding capabilities.”

Nexstor was showing its Nexsan E-Series P targeted for 4K and 8K workloads as shown in the image below. The E-Series provides up to 1.2PB in 4U with 8GB/s performance. It supports TLC SSDs, and the company says it enables the latest QLC technology. Nexstor reports that the product supports real-time analytics, machine learning, big data, media content delivery and user authentication.

Facilis was showing its shared storage products at the NAB show. Facilis has long provided storage solutions for collaborative media workflows. In addition, the company had a technology preview of its newly announced remote workflow feature based on the Facilis Shared File System. The Facilis WANLink Client provides a secure remote link to Facilis storage through the same Facilis Console software used in a production facility without using a VPN. It is available at no additional cost.

Facilis

Facilis also presented Version 8.1 of its Shared File System at the show. New features include Facilis Smart Access Rules and a graphical interface that allows administrators to add custom policies to volume resources to provide or deny access for users or groups. Users also get delete restore capability and enhanced File System audits.

There were many other storage system providers with exhibits at the show including iStarUSA, Pronology and Apricorn.

Software Solutions
LucidLink released updates to Filespaces, its cloud-native remote collaboration solution. According to the company, “Filespaces 2.0 enables organizations of any size to quickly adopt cloud services, providing more flexible hybrid office strategies for employees no matter the location.”

The new version allows metadata streaming with advanced algorithms for internet-based file streaming to enable collaboration over long distances. Faster Filespaces enable fast responsiveness, and snapshots can restore prior versions of individual files or revert entire Filespaces to earlier points. It also involves distributed global file-locking. LucidLink Filespaces 2.0 is available for Microsoft Azure customers.

DataCore Software showed its software-defined storage offerings, in particular Swarm, which is a durable target for content archiving and helps with asset management and collaboration for broadcasting and streaming services. DataCore and Atempo announced the integration of Atempo’s Miria Data Management platform with DataCore Swarm object storage software. In the fall of 2021, DataCore acquired MayaData to accelerate container deployments for cloud-first enterprises, including for media and entertainment applications. The company said to expect more to come soon.

Hammerspace’s Universal Data Access Layer enables read/write data access to any user and any application in any data center or any cloud. Hammerspace was at NAB Show talking about how its tools are being used in video workflows. Hammerspace software layers enable data tiering, multi-site data replication, compression and deduplication, WORM, file versioning and share-level Snapshots and Clones.

Cloud Storage for M&E
Post facilities are turning to the cloud to help with their collaborative video projects. Our M&E Storage Survey indicated that in 2021, about 32% of responding participants said they used cloud-based storage for editing and post. In addition, many organizations use cloud-based rendering services for their visual effects and other rendering projects, saving themselves the ongoing cost of capital equipment and maintenance.

Other parts of the video workflow are also turning to cloud storage. In our 2021 M&E survey indicated that 93% of the respondents said that they did proxy distribution through the internet. 11% said that they archived on a private or public cloud.

The figure below shows our projection for cloud storage revenues out to 2025, showing growth in cloud storage for archiving and preservation, video on demand, internet distribution, master networks and post.

Alibaba, Amazon, Avid, Backblaze, Google, Microsoft and Wasabi were at NAB offering cloud storage for media and entertainment applications. Cloudian, Facilis and Object Matrix provide object storage, which can be part of an M&E hybrid cloud environment. Other companies offering gateways, bridges and other ways to access content from object storage include Cantemo, iXsystems, MinIO, Tiger Technology and Veritone.

M&E Cloud Storage at NAB
Qumulo was offering cloud builders its new Cloud Now program. This is a no-cost solution for Qumulo customers who want to move their workloads to the cloud to avoid supply chain constraints. The Cloud Now program provides free cloud software and storage up to 1PB. The offer is available for Qumulo Cloud Q across the three major supported public clouds (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud) for customers to build proofs of concept at scale.

AWS was exhibiting its various services for media and entertainment in the new West Hall. They also introduced a new archive class, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, for archive data requiring millisecond latency. As shown below, it has 11 9s durability and 99.9% availability. It is designed for petabytes of data stored for an indefinite period of time but that needs to be immediately accessible when requested.

Storage costs for S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval are $0.004 per gigabyte per month versus the slower Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, which costs $0.0036 per gigabyte per month. Amazon offers intelligent tiering that moves data to colder and less expensive tiers as it gets used less. Amazon improved and expanded its integrity checking.

Backblaze was talking about its B2 Reserve and Universal Data Migration services. Backblaze B2 Reserve brings the company’s channel partners a capacity-based, annualized SKU that works with channel-billing models. Universal Data Migration is a free offering to help enterprises painlessly copy or migrate their data from practically any source into the company’s B2 Cloud Storage service. It allows companies to migrate data from public cloud storage, servers, NAS, SAN, tape/LTO solutions and cloud drives

Wasabi said that it is expanding its strategic relationship with Signiant beyond supporting Media Shuttle. Now it also supports Signiant Jet for automated rapid transfer and syncing of media files between supply chain endpoints and Wasabi. The company recently opened its 11th global storage location in Toronto (at an Equinix facility) to accommodate the region’s booming production industry. In addition, the company has teamed up with many global brands, including Liverpool Football Club, Boston Red Sox and Boston Bruins.

Blackmagic has announced its Blackmagic Cloud Store using flash memory to provide high performance access to large media files. With Dropbox live sync, files can be distributed between multiple global units for very fast local file access.

Summing Up
Digital storage plays an important role in all aspects of media and entertainment, from content capture through post and content distribution as well as archiving and preservation.

Tom Coughlin is president of Coughlin Associates and is a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant. Coughlin Associates publishes books and market and technology reports, including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report.