Archion Technologies has introduced EditStor ES, a shared storage system designed to enhance media workflow management in small- to mid-sized facilities.
EditStor ES works with Final Cut Studio, Avid Media Composer, Adobe CS5, Sony Vegas and other media creation tools. EditStor ES facilitates the flow, conversion and management of media within the production workflow by offering a rich media management feature set available.
Easy to set up and integrate into existing video and audio workflows, Archion said EditStor ES is ready to configure, and users can immediately start sharing media across Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. By eliminating individual seat costs or licenses, an unlimited number of workstations can be connected through a standard Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) switch.
EditStor ES’s tools include volume expansion, which enables users to create shared volumes of any size and expand volumes on the fly. Volume expansion is all managed through a Web-based administrator interface that doesn’t affect workflow.
Another feature — project sharing — extends to projects that use the most popular editing tools. Avid project sharing (available Q3), for example, will be transparent to the Avid Media Composer system and doesn’t affect the Avid workflow. Project sharing for Final Cut Studio and Adobe will also be available.
The media management feature set of EditStor ES has all of the automation tools of an enterprise storage server, including storage pools, volume replication and snapshot, data replication and volume manager as well as support for tape back systems and virtual tape volumes created in the system. To deliver maximum connectivity to the workstations that drive workflow, EditStor ES supports user and group management, user security and access as well as industry standard IT protocols.
EditStor ES comes standard with hardware RAID protection and four ports of 1 GigE, which can either be directly connected to four clients or to a standard Ethernet switch. These four ports provide up to 400MB/s bandwidth, and the addition of an optional second four-port GigE card or a single 10Gb Ethernet card significantly increases bandwidth up to 800MB/s and 1000MB/s, respectively.
With these throughput figures, EditStor ES easily supports compressed workflows, including DNxHD, ProRes and QuickTime protocols, and can be configured to support uncompressed SD or HD workflows.
