Avid expanded the maximum capacity of its Unity ISIS networked storage system with version 2.0, which now scales up to 384 TB of storage (196 TB fully mirrored) with up to 330 real-time clients. For HD users, the company caculates, that translates to 430 hours of mirrored uncompressed HD or 8700 hours of HD compressed to 50 Mb/sec.
The Unity ISIS architecture yokes together multiple rack-mounted “engines,” each of which contains an assortment of hot-swappable blades — 16 1 TB or 2 TB storage blades, two integrated Ethernet switch blades, and three 600-watt power/cooling blades. The system scales up by connecting 32 TB ISIS engines with throughput of up to 400 MB/sec each. With 12 engines, performance reaches 4.8 GB/sec — 32 streams of uncompressed HD or 240 compressed HD streams.
With the new 10 Gig-Ethernet Windows client, users can work in uncompressed HD or 2K resolutions. If you’re connected at 1 Gb/sec, Avid DNxHD 220 is the preferred HD format. Avid has also boosted the maximum file count on the system to 10 million.
The Unity ISIS is a “self-balancing” shared-storage system that distributes file-system management among clients, storage blades, and the new 64-bit System Director to optimize performance. The system’s components are designed to be redundant, and can be quickly swapped out in the event of failure. And it’s built around standard Ethernet technology, so it can be easily fit into existing IT infrastructures. (You could even use it successfully with, say, a Final Cut Pro system.)
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