IBC 2017, 15-19 September: TMD, the leading provider of asset and workflow management systems for digital and physical assets, and Concurrent, providers of software solutions for storing, protecting, transforming, and delivering visual media assets, have formed a new technology partnership to deliver integrated solutions which use the Aquari object storage platform from Concurrent, tightly integrated with TMD’s Mediaflex-UMS workflows.
Aquari uses object-based storage, in which each item is stored complete with its metadata, providing a transparent and readily scalable platform for massive amounts of data. Through this integration, Mediaflex-UMS workflows will add metadata to any Concurrent media storage object, which Aquari will protect throughout the media asset’s lifecycle.
At the heart of Aquari is the open source Ceph distributed storage system, designed for excellent performance, reliability and scalability. In the Aquari implementation it is designed as a “self-healing” architecture, ensuring zero downtime for unrivalled resilience. The scale-out architecture allows users to build systems up to exabyte scale.
An integration is currently in development which will allow Mediaflex-UMS to access Concurrent Zephyr, scale-out transcoding software that runs on the Aquari platform. This enables TMD to offer an integrated solution as an on-premises, software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, on a pay-as-you-use basis. With Concurrent transcoding, TMD will spin up the service as an agile, software-defined workflow solution, with the user paying only for usage.
“This is a very exciting partnership for us,” said Justin Elkerton, head of TMD’s partnership programme. “It gives us the ability to offer interconnectivity to state of the art object storage and provide a seamless approach to modern business process models. The Concurrent solution is designed for deployment on-premises or in a private data centre. Media users retain the security of knowing where the intellectual property is, while paying for additional service resources as they are used, allowing “bursting” without the overhead of moving material to the cloud and back again.”
Clay McCreery, Concurrent’s SVP Worldwide Sales & Marketing said, “From talking to people throughout the industry about how they are trying to improve business profitability, it is clear that faster media processing and on-demand capacity are essential. Concurrent’s flexible storage and transcoding solutions enable TMD’s Mediaflex customers to dramatically improve their operational performance, in terms of both speed and capacity. As content libraries grow, and multi-platform delivery processes scale, we’re excited to work with TMD to help our customers manage this growth and improve results.”
This solution provides highly targeted, standardised systems for rapid deployment, alongside rich, complex bespoke implementations for the largest users. Systems can be implemented in-house or delivered from the cloud, as a software as a service (SaaS) or platform as a service (PaaS). For more information, meet at IBC2017 (Amsterdam, 15-19 September) with the TMD staff (stand 2.B59) or the Concurrent team (stand 5.A08).
