Broadcast TECH


‘The coming of HD and 3D means there is more need


to store material’ Kevin Usher, Avid


£150k


The price of Avid’s Isis 2000 storage system


Avid Isis 2000: billed as enhancing workflows and optimising storage


system for broadcast news some years ago and decided to revisit the sector after assessing the market. “The coming of HD and 3D means


there is more need to store material because there is now thousands of hours of it to deal with,” Usher says. “Where we see the opportunity is in the integration and management of nearline, which is why Isis 2000 works with Interplay.”


Lower-cost system Usher says that while the Isis 2000 does not have the same characteris- tics as the higher end 5000 and 7000, because it is a lower-cost sys- tem not designed for editing, it can work with the online systems to give access to low and proxy resolution files that can be transferred over. An immediate reaction to the


introduction of the Isis 2000 was that it only works with Interplay so is not an open system. Usher says the new store could be used with


www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils


other manufacturers’ systems but, as it needs to be under the control of a media asset management (MAM) system, at the moment, Avid is “addressing customers with Inter- play”. Isis 2000 was due to go into beta test in June, with a full release planned for IBC. Aside from the issue of working


‘We can get file-based rushes,


verify them and put it all on to


nearline’ Brian Hardman, Sumners


with Interplay or not, others in the market are not sure what Isis 2000 will bring to nearline. “It’s different in where it fits in,” says Moss. “At the price [£150,000 for a 240TB engine], it’s out of reach for most facilities.” Hardman observes that the 2000 is “what we expected but not what we wanted”. He also picks up on the pricing, saying it is “not something you can go in low with”. As with any storage, nearline is,


in Watson’s term, merely a “silo” if there is no means of managing and tracking what goes into it. “The level above nearline is MAM, and that can be anything,” he says. “Some organi-


sations have spent huge amounts of money to manage their storage but others use systems like Square Box Systems CatDV and get on well.” Watson says high-end Hollywood facilities are now using DataFrame- works’ ClarityNow!, which is pro- moted as being able to help visualise and understand what is on a disk. “Nearline is no more intelligent than a laptop so you need that layer above. Sometimes we’re astonished at how disorganised people’s storage is,” says Watson. Nearline storage is now a fixture


in broadcasting and post. “How full are some people’s online systems? Most say 80-90%. Because tape storage is hard to get stuff off, they need to think about nearline,” con- cludes Pearce. And with manufacturers now con-


templating 4TB nodes to build into full systems, that is a lot of space. But to paraphrase Parkinson’s Law, people will always fill it up.


July/August 2012 | Broadcast TECH | 23


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