AMSTERDAM—Rohde & Schwarz will introduce a new compact 2U version of its R&S SpycerNode media storage system at the 2019 IBC Show. The company said the small capacity system represents Rohde’s “competitively priced entry point” into a storage market that increasingly embraces High Power Computing based on high speed Ethernet connectivity rather than Fibre Channel. Rohde & Schwarz said it will also introduce several new JBOD capacity extension units, which provide affordable storage capacity expansion for their other SpycerNode models.

The company will also launch R&S SpycerPAM, a production asset management system, which allows workgroup editing and seamless integration of various editing and mastering platforms including Adobe Premier, Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro.

The company used the announcement to tout its support for Ethernet connectivity to eventually replace Fibre Channel, a 25-year old technology that is seeing only modest growth.

“The Fibre Channel standard was completed in 1994 and it has served the media industry well, but in essence there are only around nine manufacturers developing Fibre Channel technology,” said Oliver Gappa, sales director of broadcast and media for Europe for Rohde. “Compare this to high-speed Ethernet, where there are over 500 companies, such as Juniper, Arista and Cisco introducing new products every year and the future is clear.

“Today, if you look at Fibre Channel relative to high-speed Ethernet, there is no comparison,” Gappa continued. “The future is Ethernet and yet some media storage manufacturers continue to promote Fibre Channel, which presents real risks for their customers.“

Gappa‘s remarks are backed up by industry data. On the one hand, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) reports that the Fibre Channel market saw a return to modest growth in 2018. In comparison, the Open DeviceNet Vendor Association (ODVA) reports strong growth in Ethernet switch connectivity. In 2018, port shipments for 100Gb Ethernet switches rose 154.6% year over year to 3.5 million, while 25Gb ports saw even higher growth rates with port shipments up 251.0% to 2.6 million and 40Gb port shipments rose too, growing 12.6% year over year to 1.3 million.

Rohde & Schwarz will be in Stand 7.B21 at the 2019 IBC Show at the RAI Amsterdam, Sept. 13-17.

MUNICH—Rohde & Schwarz has begun shipping its R&S SpycerNode media storage system, which was launched in September at the IBC 2018 in Amsterdam.

R&S SpycerNode leverages High Performance Computing (HPS), a combination of hardware, file system and a software approach to RAID that relies on erasure coding in combination with declustering to increase performance and reduce rebuild times, the company said. The system, which can be expanded during operation, also is highly scalable.

Erasure coding means that a data block is always written including parity. Declustering, a software-based strategy, spreads the spare disk over all other disks, which decreases rebuild times and reduces the impact on performance.

The newly shipping product features Rohde & Schwarz’ device manager web application, making setup faster and integration of other Rohde & Schwarz systems easier, the company said. In addition, device manager’s intuitive web-based UI, which is operated from a single client, simplifies maintenance and service.

R&S SpycerNode comes in various 2U and 5U chassis designs available with NL-SAS HDDs (hard disk drives) and SAS SSDs (solid-state disks) with different capacities. The product has main processor units and JBOD (just a bunch of disks) units. A main unit is redundant and equipped with two appliance controllers, each of which has two 100 Gbit interfaces.

More information is available on the Rohde & Schwarz website.