At next week's IBC, IBM plans to unveil a new supercomputing platform it says will break new speed and storage barriers for the professional video industry.
IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) has been used for several years by the scientific computing and data mining industries and has now been modified for high-end video applications. The new system, GPFS for Media is a cluster file system that runs on Linux and allows editors to view and edit simultaneously, even in high-definition, in a shared storage pool.
The new platform can hold up to 500 TB, transfer data at an accumulated transfer rate of 12 Gbps across an infrastructure and can handle up to 512 nodes of servers and storage entities managing data within an infrastructure.
For Hollywood, "it's a quantum leap in performance," says Steve Canepa, vice president, Global Media and Entertainment Industry for IBM.
The most useful GPFS media applications include feed and edit, infrastructure integration and video-on-demand. GPFS for Media has been deployed in video-on-demand and iTV trials for video archiving and for high performance computing. CNN, Bell Atlantic and Hong Kong Telecom are among the early customers using GPFS for Media.
