Advanced Digital Information Corporation and Hitachi Data Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd, today present the fastest and largest capacity SAN-based video file sharing solution for the video production and digital broadcasting industry.
The new solution demonstrates to customers the ability to successfully manage both anticipated and unanticipated rapid increases in requirements to access stored files 24 hours a day. This directly addresses the problem of performance and capacity shortcomings of current NFS and CIFS solutions
The solution combines ADIC's high speed file sharing system, CentraVision, and Hitachi Freedom Storage to deliver an extremely high throughput video engine. ADIC's CentraVision sharing layer connects the video production team's individual heterogeneous workstations to the centrally stored video footage, enabling them to work on files at the source. This eliminates the cumbersome task of individuals having to manually copy the piece of video that they want to work on from the central archive and then copy it back once they have completed their work.
Furthermore, this degree of enhanced access allows video production and broadcasting companies to greatly improve workflow for applications such as video editing, streaming video over IP, and digital broadcasting. The technology also provides dramatic performance gains for other high data volume industries, including pre-press, seismic analysis, and high performance computing.
Hitachi Freedom Storage provides this solution with powerful performance and scalability, speed and reliability, and brings data-centre levels of resilience to the studio environment. The Hitachi Freedom Storage Thunder 9200 is well-suited for studio environments while larger broadcaster centres will enjoy the Hitachi Freedom Storage Lightning 9960.
The Lightning 9960 is an intelligent data storage system that delivers up to 88 terabytes of non-disruptive scalability. The unique Hi-Star switched architecture of the Lightning 9960 combines with up to 32 Fibre Channel ports to deliver bottleneck-free performance in SAN environments. This connectivity and performance level enables the whole production team to access video files at the same time. In addition, the CentraVision environment allows the stored video to be striped across all ports to create an extremely wide funnel for fast, high volume throughput.
"Hitachi Data Systems provides an ideal storage infrastructure for data-intensive, rich-media applications," said Glenn Brackenridge, Performance Consultant, Hitachi Data Systems. "By working closely with ADIC, we have clearly demonstrated the power of Hitachi Freedom storage for high performance video file sharing environments. This demonstration clearly shows that the combination of Hitachi Freedom Storage and ADIC CentraVision can meet the requirements of the largest rich media applications. This is especially important with the inevitable move toward digitisation of more business processes. "
Paul Rutherford, ADIC Vice President of Technology and Software, added: "We are excited about our latest, 2.0 version of CentraVision. It has expanded our platform support to include Linux and Sun, included an enhanced, journaled 64-bit file system, and added High Availability capabilities. CentraVision can now support mission-critical applications common in most broadcast and corporate environments. We chose to work with Hitachi Data Systems as we felt the unique performance and storage capacity of their Freedom Storage deliver a superior storage foundation for the intensive application demands of broadcast and video production."
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Hitachi Data Systems, the fastest growing enterprise storage provider, is a leading supplier of storage hardware, software, solutions and services. As a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd (NYSE: HIT), Japan's largest electronics company, Hitachi Data Systems is committed to providing the storage infrastructure for the world's most information-intensive corporations. With 2 600 employees, Hitachi Data Systems does business through direct sales and resellers in the public and private sectors in 170 countries on six continents. Its customers include more than 50% of Fortune 100 companies.) For more information, please visit our Web site at www.hds.com.
Hitachi, Ltd
Hitachi, Ltd, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is one of the world's leading global electronics companies, with fiscal 1999 (ended 31 March 2000) consolidated sales of 8 001 billion yen ($75.5 billion(1)). The company manufactures and markets a wide range of products, including computers, semiconductors, consumer products and power and industrial equipment. For more information on Hitachi, Ltd, please visit Hitachi's Web site at www.hitachi.co.jp.
(1) At an exchange rate of 106 yen to the dollar.
ADIC
Advanced Digital Information Corporation (NASDAQ: ADIC) is a leading storage solutions provider to the open systems marketplace, offering a broad range of Intelligent Storage products designed to enhance organisations' abilities to store, protect, manage and use their rapidly growing network data. ADIC products include technology-independent automated storage systems, specialised storage management software, and multiple-protocol storage networking (SAN/NAS) connectivity and management tools. ADIC storage products are available through a worldwide sales force and a global network of resellers and OEMs, including Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and IBM. Further information about ADIC is available at www.adic.com
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