NAB 2012

[rberd]

Curious if anyone attended NAB this year, and if anyone is willing to share their thoughts/impressions of the latest trends in storage technologies.

[keithkoby]

This MDC add on from Bright Technologies looks pretty cool.

I have no idea how much it costs or if it really works, but it claims to do something that all of us xsan/snfs admins would love to have built in: Eliminate performance loss caused by fragmentation.

Jeff from host of this site, tekserve, hipped me to them. I think it only works with snfs mdcs, not xsan mdcs.

Also, it seemed as if everyone was showing a mam. I saw Geller's MetaMAM and it looks great. Anyone considering a replacement for Final Cut Server should look at it. It has many of the artboxy features that people mourned when fcs was released and looks to be much more solid whereas it is based on filesystem events rather than watchers for catalog and automations.

I'll try to post a few other things later.

[morphenine]

I went. Saw a lot of stuff, some good, some not so good. Like Keithkoby said, everyone has a MAM that they're showing off. Actually its been like that the last couple years.

As for the future of storage, one of the big things I saw this year was the object based storage. Intel is investing a lot in this, and its the basis of several existing storage systems already. It was a very interesting concept, I'd recommend researching it. But basically anyone who was showing it just has you buy the storage and lets you hook whatever MAM you want into it for retrieval. Not something that many NLEs can use directly yet, but possibly in the future. If I'm reading it correctly, the Bright Technologies product works the same as the obj based storage.

The other thing that everyone is going toward in 10GbE networked storage. Until recently networked storage wasn't feasable for Video editors, because you only have a 1Gb pipe coming out of a NAS. Although ProRes is only ~250Mb you could still only get 2, maybe 3 streams out of it (overhead, other traffic, etc). I can get 50 editors on a SAN with almost no latency. Then they started clustering the NAS appliances, but if you wanted more bandwidth you'd have to buy another appliance which came with more storage, and a hefty price tag.
So now they've started making NAS appliances that use 10GbE cards or modules that you can add in. It makes each appliance a little more useful. However, you're still not going to get the throughput of a SAN, but its a little cheaper for those smaller 3-10 editor deployments. Avid already makes products that do something similar to this, everyone's just following suit.


Oh, and we're finally seeing less 3D crap (thank God). Although the glasses-free 3D was kinda trippy...and headache inducing.

[keithkoby]

I should add that Promise and Active were both showing their dense 60 or so drive 4ru appliances (I joke with the active guys that their appliance actually looks like an appliance - an AC unit or something).

Promise had a dual mini mdc with sanlink setup on a cable managed rack solution that slid in and out and was cool. Similar to sonnet's stuff, but with sanlinks instead of cards mounted in pci-e to thunderbolt chassis.

I don't recall ever seeing a netapp booth on the floor at nab, but they were there as well showing something, god knows what. Flavorsys had a strawberry server in their booth. I'm excited and a little upset about what they are doing at the same time. I find myself falling into the court of the people who are saying we ought to stay street legal with what we do to interface with this next generation of NLE apps rather than hacking around...

Thunderbolt was all over the place. Intel had a wall display of all commercially available thunderbolt devices which was impressive. And they had an HP (or whatever windows laptop) on display with a thunderbolt port which should be released momentarily. Blackmagic had thunderbolt ports built in to their modular a/v router, I guess so you can just plug minis or whatever directly to the a/v router and not have to purchase separate thunderbolt IO devices for capture. There were also a few people showing long and short thunderbolt cables. I think the longest I saw was 100 ft. There were a couple 1 and 3 footers which is better for cable management and cheaper than apple's one size fits all.