DDN unveils Mediascaler 2.0
April 13, 2016

DDN unveils Mediascaler 2.0

SANTA CLARA, CA DataDirect Networks (DDN) (www.ddn.com) announces the availability of its new DDN Mediascaler Converged Media Workflow Storage Platform. According to DDN, which is touting the new Mediascaler 2.0 as the world’s fastest, densest, most scalable media storage platform, the new system manages the complete workflow from ingest to archive and the cloud in a single, unified appliance. Designed for use throughout post production, broadcast and content delivery, the new Mediascaler delivers the power to accelerate highly concurrent media workflows, a wide range of media formats and offers end-to-end digital content management from high performance ingest and processing to cloud collaboration and active archiving.

“Data rate is the biggest challenge in high-performance media workflows,” says Tom Coughlin, founder and lead analyst, Coughlin Associates. “The size of video frames are increasing due to higher resolutions such as 4K and 8K, high dynamic range (HDR), higher frame rates (HFR) and more cameras simultaneously capturing content per project. New format standards like IMF are creating more efficient distribution standards but require more metadata and customized content during production. To address these challenges, today’s media workflows require a data infrastructure that can manage every aspect of the media lifecycle coherently and offer the highest levels of performance. At the same time this infrastructure must be simple to install, configure and manage while delivering massive per client performance, supporting collaborative environments, content distribution and the latest processor and interconnect technologies. DDN's Mediascaler 2.0 provides technological innovations for media and entertainment storage that will help customers meet their data growth, access and workflow challenges.”

With increased speed, density and scale, Mediascaler 2.0 builds on DDN’s Mediascaler platform and solves the ever-increasing data access challenges faced by high-performance media workflows. DDN Mediascaler 2.0 delivers a best-in-class solution that allows end-to-end media workflows to be managed within a single platform—across ingest, editing, transcoding, distributing, collaborating and archiving.  New Mediascaler 2.0 advantages include: new custom-designed hardware platform delivers 42 GB/s throughput for 40 concurrent uncompressed 4K streams on a single system; supports high resolution formats including 4K, 8K UHD, HDR and IMF; d elivers full native performance from the latest SSD technologies such as NVMe and SAS SSD integrated by PCI-e fabric delivering low latency, high performance to embedded applications and file systems; industry-leading density offering up to 14 PB in one, 2-rack appliance; and broad industry certifications including Vizrt, SGI, Rohde & Schwartz, Dimension Data, Arris, Dalet and Tiger Technology.

According to DDN, Mediascaler offers higher bandwidth than traditional scale-out NAS and a unified storage infrastructure that accelerates media applications that have historically been bottlenecked by traditional NAS performance . It achieves up to 6GB/s throughput per media workload client, more than 40 concurrent uncompressed 4K streams on a single system and, DDN reports, 800 percent faster ingest than its nearest competitor. It provides industry-leading density and massive scalability for core workflows, delivering 2x more density and 20x the scalability of its closest competitor.

The Mediascaler 2.0 Converged Media Workflow Storage Platform is available and shipping now.