by Ed Harper Issue 102 - June 2015
As the 10th anniversary of the Avid ISIS shared storage product line approaches this autumn, Ed Harper, senior product manager in the Avid ISIS collaborative storage solutions group, looks at how the company continues to innovate its flagship, flexible and scalable storage solution.
Over the years, our engineering team have worked hard driving new, innovative and industry leading capabilities. As a result, a remarkable number of media organisations depend on ISIS shared storage systems and deem it as a reliable and critical component to their workflow. The range and amount of content thats been created and stored on ISIS shared storage system is incredible from movies to television shows, documentaries, streamed media, sporting events and news programmes.
Creative teams of all sizes are facing the same demands as larger organisations. These include where to store the ever-increasing quantity of media, while sharing it without having to connect and disconnect local drives or copy media to multiple systems.
To help address these issues, not only have we scaled the storage to meet the needs of smaller teams, but the price has also been scaled to meet everyones budget. Enter the Avid ISIS | 1000 - our latest shared storage system launched at NAB 2015 that makes the power and the reliability of the ISIS file system affordable for everyone.
ISIS | 1000 delivers shared access to multiple users over simple and easy Ethernet connections. The storage engine connects to inexpensive NETGEAR and Dell Networking switches using a 10GbE connection and provides either 1 or 10GbE connections to clients. ISIS | 1000 also delivers predictable playback to multiple editors, with unique technology to ensure that one editor does not affect the playback of another editor working off of the same shared storage system.
A single ISIS | 1000 can deliver 36 streams of XDCAM-50, 5 streams of REDCODE 5K 8:1 24 fps, 2 streams of ProRES 422 HQ 4K, 2 streams of F55 raw 4K, 16 streams of DNxHR LB or 3 streams of DNxHR HQ 10-bit. Even if two hard drives fail, ISIS | 1000 continues to work, it uses dual-disk protection, allowing the team to continue working and deliver to the client on time. Using four ISIS |1000 engines, the above stream counts increase by 4x, empowering more creativity and faster turnaround and enables creative teams to take on more work, turn projects around faster and reliably beat deadlines.
Another significant update to the ISIS family has been the systems openness. Weve been working with partners enabling ISIS to support the leading creative tools in the industry. Most recently we announced a collaboration with Adobe that significantly increased the performance of Adobe Premiere Pro CC on ISIS storage. ISIS | 1000 also benefits from these enhancements to deliver stellar performance.
Whats next for the ISIS family? Well continue making unmatched investments in performance, interoperability, scalar, and workflow labs that enable us to test ISIS using the most demanding workflows.
