Avid Ups HD Power With New ISIS

Pushing the limits on big-time capacity and scalability for HD collaboration, Avid on Monday unveiled Unity ISIS 2.0.

The company says the new media network solution sets benchmarks with up to 384 TB of storage and can scale up to 330 real-time clients with full system monitoring.

Customers can now save on the costs of maintaining multiple storage systems, Avid said.

“The performance of the 10 GigE client connection in the Avid Unity ISIS has been fantastic,” said Ian Burling, head of technical support services at Films @ 59 (in Bristol, England) and an ISIS 2.0 beta tester. “It’s allowed us to connect multiple Avid Symphony systems working in various HD uncompressed frame rates, each pulling multiple streams at the same time. In fact, we just can’t seem to max out the bandwidth capabilities of the system. Avid Unity ISIS makes scheduling the online edit suites a simple task. Previously, we had to use SCSI storage to get uncompressed HD performance, which limited the flexibility to move projects around the building. As a post facility where we do lots of HD work and have an ever-changing schedule, this high resolution support is a huge benefit and has the ability to greatly increase our productivity.”

ISIS is a blade-based storage subsystem with intelligent dual-drive storage elements, integrated Ethernet switching and redundant power and cooling. Unlike common storage area networks (SANs), the self-balancing Avid Unity ISIS architecture distributes data and metadata so that each intelligent storage element can make instant decisions that collectively optimize the performance, capacity and health of the entire system, Avid said.

It delivers a 10 GBps Ethernet client that supports resolutions up to uncompressed HD and 2K, made possible by performance of up to 400 MBps per ISIS Engine, scaling to maximum performance across 12 engines of 4.8 GBps or a total of 32 streams of uncompressed HD or 240 streams of compressed HD.

Total capacity of the system is now 384 TB (maximum capacity) or 196 TB (when fully mirrored) of space, with full system monitoring. In mirrored mode, this means up to 300 hours of uncompressed HD or 6,300 hours of 50 MBps compressed HD.