Affordable Uncompressed Storage Becomes Reality

If you thought HD video cost-effectively played out from networked servers had to be compressed, think again. Exanet, a New York City-based developer of network-attached media storage (NAS), will demonstrate affordable play-out of uncompressed HD content from a NAS system at IBC 2005 in Amsterdam this week.
The demo will use the company’s existing ExaStore software-based storage system as the platform to demonstrate its ability to manage high data rates with superior reliability, fault tolerance, and on-the-fly scalability. The new high-speed networked storage technology is targeted at the HD film, broadcast and video postproduction markets.
Exanet said a viable storage platform for HDTV must offer sustained performance fast enough to deliver or accept multiple uncompressed or compressed video streams. To date, this level of performance has only been possible using other, more costly and complicated technologies, like a storage area network (SAN) with Gigabit-Ethernet networking.
At IBC, Exanet said it will show a substantially simpler and lower-cost NAS technology maxed out for rich media production environments. The new system requires no special hardware or software in the workstation or host computer, as it is based on off-the-shelf Intel-based servers. Clustered configurations use storage node pairs for redundancy.
Based on RAID technology, ExaStore storage gains reliability because there is no single point of failure. Redundant pairs of storage nodes with transparent failover protect file access, and multiple network paths to each storage node protect against network failures. System maintenance and upgrades can be performed online.