DataDirect Networks Revolutionizes Big Media Workflows with Tiered Storage Solutions that Enable Enterprises to Drastically Improve Performance, Scalability and Efficiency of their Post Production, Broadcast and Content Delivery Operations

LAS VEGAS, April 7, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- 2014 NAB Show, Booth #SL8016 --

News Summary

In this new age of high definition, on-demand digital media, Media and Entertainment (M&E) companies are challenged to evolve their IT infrastructure fast enough to keep pace with the data demands of their customers. Producing, editing and distributing media assets cost-effectively requires a content workflow supported by highly efficient IT infrastructures. From content capture/ingest to post production to play-out/distribution to active archives, DDN offers an economical, high performance, and on-demand shared storage environment to address the challenges of M&E companies. With over 15 years of experience and 600+ media customers, DDN is revolutionizing the big media workflows of today, and laying the foundation for scalable and elastic storage infrastructures of tomorrow.

News Facts

• Digital studios, broadcasters, cable providers and Internet delivery networks are solving their big media challenges with DataDirect Networks (DDN) storage solutions designed for the world's most content-intensive workflows – from ingest to editing, transcoding, distribution and archiving.
• With the most complete storage portfolio for M&E customers today, DDN is enabling dramatically improved business agility for clients by delivering 10,000 times greater scalabilityⁱ, 40 percent datacenter space savingsⁱⁱ, and 50 percent less power and coolingⁱⁱⁱ, while offering 13 times more bandwidth^iv to process and handle more streams^v over any other competitive offering.
• DDN offers file and object storage solutions for every part of the content lifecycle with a single, seamless, end-to-end platform. Unlike traditional enterprise storage, DDN™ technology eliminates silos by enabling customers to manage all workflows, all formats, all content and all device types in one place.
• With its broad portfolio of big data and cloud storage offerings, DDN is giving its M&E customers the confidence that their critical systems and information are protected, improving the delivery of digital content across geographically distributed data centers and addressing the storage and workflow performance needs of broadcast and film and post production organizations everywhere.   

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At NAB Show, DDN Showcases Active Archive and Content Delivery Use Cases in Booth #SL8016

• Active Archive Demo: The ultimate collaboration story told by global post-production company, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group. Learn how Deluxe uses DDN WOS® object storage platform to free up expensive tier-1 storage, increase utilization and efficiencies of geo-dispersed compute and creative resources, and create a much easier scaling path over time.
• Content Origin and Delivery Demo: Find out how the biggest content delivery networks solve their largest, unpredictable storage needs. Level 3 Communications will demonstrate its Cloud Content Exchange service powered by DDN's GRIDScaler™ solution.
• ASG Digital Archive Demo:  Visit the DDN Booth #SL8016 from 2:00-2:30 p.m. PT every day to meet our partners from ASG and discover how its digital archive (ADA) solution utilizes DDN's WOS object storage platform to achieve the highest performance and most cost-effective disk-based archive solution in the market.
• Active Archive Alliance Session: Join DDN and the Active Archive Alliance in room S224 on Tuesday, April 8 from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. PT for a panel session that will showcase the way active archive technology is delivering a new level of capability to media and entertainment IT environments, allowing them to store and easily retrieve data in ways that weren't possible before.

Next Generation Content Solutions for Media and Entertainment

Delivering the highest levels of concurrency, with DDN next generation content solutions, collaborative workflows are accelerated, whether local or worldwide. DDN high performance Tier-1 solutions help users deploy less storage, servers and networking components than with competitive platforms. And, WOS cloud storage provides a simple, cost-efficient object storage platform to enable new revenue opportunities for established content – with active archiving, at nearly the cost of tape. Using DDN technology, M&E customers address their most critical high-performance production, editing, collaboration, archive and delivery business challenges, including:

• Broadcast & Film Production and Editing – With larger formats and higher resolution more commonplace, broadcasters, film production companies and post-production houses must overcome the hurdles of crowded storage environments which threaten to slow production and inhibit the creative process. With DDN storage solutions, users can streamline their workflows, eliminate content silos, shorten time to market, thereby unleashing the creative process and reducing the overall cost of production storage. Using a combination of DDN GRIDScaler for Tier-1, production storage and WOS for a seamlessly connected active archive, studios can manage the size of their high performance storage while moving off content quickly and easily to their active archive tier built on WOS storage. This strategy eliminates the complexity of multiple tiers, reducing the overhead of additional storage maintenance and management associated with traditional solutions. With its high data throughput and parallel infrastructure, GRIDScaler, the industry's fastest NAS and parallel scale out storage appliance, makes the ultimate production storage solution. WOS object storage is the ideal active archive delivering the industry's best balance of high performance, scalability, ease of use and very low TCO.  

• Web Content Origin and Delivery Networks – The world's largest cable and telco television providers that are looking to implement or expand their content origin or delivery infrastructure are often faced with the choice of whether to build, buy or rent their solution. With the DDN WOS solution, users now have a storage platform purpose built for digital content, making the "buy approach" the smartest one. WOS technology delivers easy setup and administration, low TCO and a high performance online content origin and delivery infrastructure. Capable of scaling to billions of objects in a single instance, WOS enables set up of a multi-petabyte geographically distributed self-healing solution in hours instead of days or weeks, all managed by less than one full time employee. WOS delivers fast uploads through local ingest, and with a choice of highly optimized data protection schema, is highly secure and multi-tenant enabled.

• Cloud Services – WOS is the only object storage system that is optimized for high-speed throughput of large data volumes and super-fast I/O operations for small files, allowing users to mix different sized objects on a single high performance platform with greater disk efficiency. This makes DDN storage ideal for hyperscale cloud, social and Internet applications like Internet music-delivery and photo-sharing sites. For multi-site cloud deployments, the built-in WOS Latency-Aware Access Manager will automatically address data access requests to the location with the lowest latency. Integration between WOS and GRIDScaler offers users comprehensive data management and ILM tools with cloud connectivity to seamlessly manage, distribute and archive data. By embedding the file system inside the storage, DDN storage provides non-disruptive and infinite scale out capacity to maximize the value of content assets.

• Collaboration and Global Distribution – Collaborative network editing is transforming television and video production. DDN's unique SFA™ architecture enables these users to store all file-based data in one place so that producers can work on it locally and from multiple locations at once. With real-time QoS, users can work concurrently on the same file or on different files, generating hundreds of SD, HD, 2K, 3D and 4K streams for ingest, edit, rendering and playout access all on the same storage pool – without performance degradation or fear of dropping a frame. And for large animation and effects rendering farms that must operate at their peak 24/7, seamless integration between DDN products enables users to offload GRIDScaler jobs from a central location to WOS storage for multisite cloud-based collaboration, global distribution and disaster recovery for maximum performance without downtime.

Supporting Quotes

• According to DDN CMO, Molly Rector, "Production studios, broadcasters and other customers in the media and entertainment industry are expected to deal with a multitude of issues and tasks associated with big media workflows, including high-performance production, editing, ingest, archive and delivery and more. By leveraging DDN technology with unparalleled performance, ease of management and cost-efficiency for their demanding workflows as part of a highly efficient IT infrastructure, users can create without limitations, collaborate more confidently and shorten time to market."

Supporting Resources

• DDN 2014 NAB Show Landing Page
• More on DDN Object Storage
• More on DDN File Storage
• More on DDN's work with Media & Entertainment companies

Get Involved

• Sign up for a personalized meeting with a DDN representative at 2014 NAB Show or request a complimentary exhibit hall pass
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About DataDirect Networks

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world leader in massively scalable storage. Our data storage and processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high growth IT environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity. DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver business results from their information. Our customers include the world's leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, media production, and security and intelligence organizations. Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, DDN's solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world's most scalable data centers to ensure competitive business advantage for today's information powered enterprise. For more information, go to www.ddn.com or call 1-800-837-2298.

©2014 All rights reserved. DDN, SFA, WOS, GRIDScaler, are trademarks owned by DataDirect Networks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

ⁱ DDN WOS storage offers 10,000X larger namespace as compared to EMC Isilon
ⁱⁱ When comparing the same performance and capacity, DDN storage enables  40 percent more space savings as compared to Quantum
ⁱⁱⁱ DDN storage uses 50% less power, cooling and rack space as compared to EMC Isilon
^iv With 48GB/s, DDN offers 13x higher bandwidth than EMC Isilon in a single system
^v DDN speeds operations and workflows by handling more streams on a single appliance as compared to EMC Isilon and NetApp

DDN Media Contact:
Dani Kenison
Sr. Director, Global Corporate Communications
Email: [email protected]
Work: 408-990-2658

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SOURCE DataDirect Networks (DDN)