The IP Incredibles Storage options have become surprisingly elastic and are a much better fit for dips in your production cycles

Network-attached storage (NAS), which adds storage onto existing networks, is where most large files reside these days.
Maxium Throughput understands that Ethernet-connected studios are the growing norm and has taken the IT side of the equation and incorporated it with video I/O. New at NAB will be the 2.0 version of its media management software, featuring a rich-media interface where bins, clips and a sequencing timeline all coexist, and InfinARRAY, a software upgrade that will link multiple Sledgehammer NAS boxes, the company’s flagship product.
Unlike traditional SAN and NAS, Sledgehammer doesn’t relyon 3rd-party software and is Linux-based, thereby integrating Mac and PC systems better than other solutions. You can increase your storage capacity from 2 to more than 32 terabytes, depending on the project.
"You tell the box what you want to do with it," says vice president of sales and marketing, John Miller. It’s not surprising, says Miller, that a number of folks in the post community are starting to buy Sledgehammers to replace tape-based VTRs. When controlled remotely, the Sledgehammer (1) can act as a virtual tape machine that an entire facility can access. www.max-t.com
Exanet, a two-year old company, is taking the NAS concept on step further. "Storage is a tactical resource," says Per Sjofors, Exanet’s vice president of media and entertainment and founder of the nonprofit group, G-SAM. "If a post house gets a job and beefs up on storage, then it will inevitably have a lot of unused disk space once the job is complete." Exanet’s proposition, with its ExaStore system, is to create a virtual, "distributed storage" that. "It turns storage in a strategic resource," he says. "Lots of people are using SANs, but it’s complicated and expensive," says Sjofors. "It takes days to scale back a SAN-you usually have to take it down and rebuild it-so we’ve made it more affordable by making it scalable, and fast, at 1.25 GB per second." Exanet does it all in software without proprietary algorithms (it’s natively compatible with Apple OS X and Unix/Linux) that are installed, RAID-style, between front-end networking equipment and back-end disk arrays, condensing a normal NAS into a single, expandable resource. www.exanet.com
Masstech has also taken the IT path, focusing its distributed storage solutions primarily on the broadcast market so that everyone in production, on the air or on the enterprise network can share media. The company will introduce, among other products, enhancements to MassStore, the Web-based flagship, plugs into video servers, near-line storage, production, archive management and traffic automation.www.masstechgroup.com
When size and scale aren’t an issue, RAID upgrades are often just right. Medà© a just began shipping its latest Fibre Channel product for video post, graphics and content creation applications, the new VideoRaid FCR2 and FCR2X Fibre Channel RAID storage arrays (2). The FCR2 has sustained data transfer rates of 180 Mbps; the FCR2X comes with dual 2-GB Fibre Channel interfaces and delivers sustained data transfer rates of up to 320 Mbps, ample enough for working in HD. Both have four-port Fibre Channel hubs for connecting up to four workstations. www.medea.com
Huge Systems, acquired this year by Ciprico, will be offering discounts on its 320S series of RAID systems and showing its U32oR and U320RX RAID arrays. wwwhugesystems.com