Omneon has launched the MediaGrid active storage system designed specifically for the demands of working with large digital media files within broadcast and video production facilities.
Combining grid storage and grid computing through the use of multiple intelligent, interconnected-yet-independent storage servers, the new system provides centralized shared storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth and media processing power.
The modular design of MediaGrid uses industry standard components and connectivity to create a highly configurable, reliable and cost-effective system.
Components of the system communicate over standard Ethernet and generate massive aggregate bandwidth that is available to external clients of the system, eliminating bottlenecks associated with traditional shared-storage environments. Each storage component is also a media-processing engine, making computational resources available to applications for media processing functions while content resides within the storage system.
The main components of a MediaGrid system are ContentDirectors and ContentServers. ContentDirectors act as the overall file system controllers. ContentServers are the engines that actually store and provide access to media. ContentServers, available in 2TB high-bandwidth and 12TB high-capacity configurations, are individual storage servers that provide a combination of storage capacity, high-bandwidth network access and processing power.
Storage capacities can start as small as a few terabytes and scale to more than a petabyte. Bandwidth starts at multiple gigabits per second and increases to many times that amount as additional ContentServers are added.
For more information, visit www.omneon.com.
