Flash, SAN, and Scale-Out NAS Platforms Double Performance Metrics for Broadcast and 4K Production, VFX and Animation Rendering, Media Transactions and Analytics

SUNNYVALE, Calif. - April 02, 2015 -

The media and entertainment industry is facing an enormous challenge as video resolutions increase, render farms grow, digital delivery platforms proliferate, and companies struggle with how to monetize their content and analyze their business. Storing, managing, moving, and migrating that data content have taken on a critical role.

At next week's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Conference, NetApp® (booth SL #13309) will showcase its storage portfolio of solutions that help tackle these challenges. In the past three years, NetApp has installed over 300 petabytes of storage capacity integrated with over 100 media applications in broadcast facilities, studios, program delivery service organizations, and Internet media sites.

"Our customers are looking for storage solutions that can improve efficiency across production, management, delivery, transaction, and analytic workflows," said Jason Danielson, media and entertainment solutions at NetApp. "NetApp's recent advances in data mobility, flash integration, and video bandwidth can allow better HD/4K production, media lifecycle management, viewer analytics, data security, and cloud transition strategies. This ultimately improves ROI."

Booth Highlights:

  • New NetApp® StorageGRID® Webscale: This new object storage solution manages media repositories. It is available as an appliance or as software only. StorageGRID Webscale object store is a next-generation solution for multipetabyte distributed content repositories, providing erasure coding or, alternatively, automatic file copies to remote locations.

  • NetApp® EF All-Flash Arrays: The EF all-flash arrays provide the lowest IOPS per dollar for media metadata, transaction, and analytic processes. It is also game-changing for 4K and high-frame-rate production workgroups who need to edit, render, and transcode concurrently.

  • NetApp® E-Series: Large broadcast production workgroups, huge content repositories, and boutique 4K facilities, where no dropped frames can be tolerated, all rely on NetApp E-Series, the production storage platform with 99.999% reliability. Based in Burbank, California, My Eye Media uses quality control as a competitive differentiator when providing video production and processing services to its studio and television network customers. After evaluating several solutions, My Eye Media chose a NetApp E-Series array running the Quantum StorNext 5 streaming file system.

    "In our industry, it's all about bandwidth," says Steve Waugh, chief technology officer at My Eye Media. "We need to be able to stream as many video files as possible simultaneously. Therefore, we selected the NetApp E-Series because of its massive bandwidth performance, the NetApp support model, and the fact that we received several recommendations from companies in our industry already using the E-Series with great results."

  • NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP® with FAS8000 Series: The NetApp clustered Data ONTAP operating system running on the company's new FAS8000 provides drastically improved video bandwidth and provides always-on operations for local broadcast news operations, advertising sales, animation and VFX rendering, viewer analytics, and high-speed transcoding for digital platforms. To accelerate the rendering process, Rainmaker Entertainment, one of the world's most sought after animation and visual effects studios, recently installed FAS8000 series systems with a combination of NetApp Flash Cache™ PCIe-attached intelligent caching and NetApp Flash Pool™ intelligent caching, which automates the use of solid-state disk to reduce latency.

    "With NetApp, we get a lot of performance utilizing flash storage along with the disk subsystem," says Dave Algar, principal systems administrator at Rainmaker. "To get the performance we need, we don't have to put a caching appliance in front of it, as we did with our previous storage systems."

  • NetApp® in the Cloud: Media organizations can now take advantage of all the data efficiency, management, and mobility features of Data ONTAP® storage operating system with the cloud First, the NetApp Cloud ONTAP™ operating system, available in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, runs 100% in the AWS Cloud and provides NetApp Data ONTAP storage operating system functionality with the agility and cost benefits of the AWS Cloud. Second, NetApp Private Storage for the cloud gives the benefits of cloud compute with the data security features of NetApp private storage. NetApp SteelStore® product provides backup and archive capabilities to the AWS Cloud with all the benefits of Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier storage services. In addition, media operations can take advantage of NetApp Data ONTAP storage operating system functionality by renting cloud services from one of our many cloud service provider partners. IBM's SoftLayer will present several media cloud services in the NetApp booth.

About NetApp
Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future. To learn more visit www.netapp.com.

Press Contact:
Meghan Fintland
Senior Manager, Corporate Communications at NetApp
1 408 822 1389
xdl-uspr@netapp.com

NetApp, and the NetApp logo, clustered Data ONTAP, Data ONTAP, and StorageGRID are trademarks or registered trademarks of NetApp, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. SteelStore is a trademark of Riverbed Technology used pursuant to license. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such.www.netapp.com/us/legal/netapptmlist.aspx

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