BlueArc – Your Media Transcoding and Delivery Friend

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Entertainment companies have the burden of distributing their content to an ever-increasing list of devices, formats and services.   Working with, transcoding and delivering 3D, HD, 2K and 4K content and the massive file sizes they represent puts a considerable load on storage systems and the IT organizations that manage those systems.   BlueArc’s Mercury and Titan Network Attach Storage (NAS) platforms bring together massive IO, bandwidth, scale and flexibility in a way that not many others can match…and almost no one can do for the price.

BlueArc’s unique architecture and feature set have made them the storage platform of choice for some of the biggest studios, post-production houses and media distribution organizations the world over.

Click the image below for their White Paper on why BlueArc is among the very elite in this industry.

Contact us today if you’d like to discuss how BlueArc’s storage might help your organization and feel free to check out our BlueArc Mini-Site for more info.

Nexsan’s E18 Array – Storage Swiss Army Knife

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Nexsan’s E18 SAN array is a fantastic SAN storage platform that has a level of flexibility that not a lot of folks can match; and certainly not at its price point.  Whether its ultra-fast primary storage or an archive-level backup target, the E18 will shine in almost any role.

Dense:

  • 18 Drives in on 2U of Rackspace
  • Expanded to either 36 or 78 drives via the E18X or E60X Expansion Chassis

Flexibile:

  • Supports SSD, 15k SAS and SATA Drives
  • Supports 1Gbe and 10Gbe iSCSI and 8GB Fibre Channel

Efficient:

  • AutoMAID granular drive spin down feature greatly reduces power/cooling draw when idle

Please visit our Nexsan Mini-Site or contact us for more info.

Nexsan’s E5000 Scalable NAS – Lookout NetApp

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Our good friends at Nexsan have recently taken the wraps of a cool new product line: their E5000 Series NAS systems.

There are 3 models:

  • E5110 – scales to 31 drives via a 16-bay JBOD
  • E5310 – scales to 240 drives via Nexsan’s E60 and E18 SAN arrays
  • E5510 – scales to 360 drives “” “”

All E5000’s come with a full compliment is enterprise-class features including snapshots, replication, thin provisioning and wizard-based setup.  In addition, they also have an optional feature called FASTier…this is where it gets interesting.

FASTier uses SSD drives in the system to accelerate read and write IOPs and well as thruput.  Its basically like bolting a turbo to the system and is extremely helpful for random I/O workloads like databases and for virtualization.

The E5000’s are NAS-only at launch but will have iSCSI support in the near future, making them truly unified storage platforms.

Contact us if you’d like to discuss further.

More info on our Nexsan Mini Site

Nimble Storage – the best iSCSI SAN for VDI

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Anyone who’s ever implemented or looked into implementing VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) knows this: VDI is an absolute IOPs monster.  The amount of IOPs a typical VDI environment can generate is staggering (especially with Windows 7).  Boot storms, anti-virus scans and patching can create generate far more IOPs load than all the other applications in your enterprise combined and its not uncommon for a midrange Windows 7 VDI environment to pull >15k IOPs during those peaks.

Most traditional SANs deal with this in pretty much the same way: by throwing a lot of 15k drives at the problem.  A 15k rpm SAS drive is said to push ~180 IOPs so most vendors simply use that to calculate how many live drives they’ll need to satisfy the IOPs load.  There are many problems with this:

  • 15k drives are expensive
  • Its wasteful to store low-level and backup data on 15k drives so you’ll likely also need a tier of SATA drives
  • Getting the SAN to quickly adjust to changing IO loads can be tricky
  • The high cost of powering and cooling all these drives
  • All these drives consume a fair amount of rack space

Nimble’s unique CASL architecture solves these problems.  Here’s how:

  • Each Nimble array uses a mix of SSD and high-capacity SATA drives
  • The SSDs are used as system cache, not a tier
  • This allows the SAN to adjust extremely quickly to IO changes
  • Wire-speed inline compression greatly reduces data footprint
  • All data is stored in variable block sizes which also improves performance and efficiency
  • Random writes are aggregated and written as a single RAID stripe

The result: 18k+ IOPs and far more data stored per 3U array.  The below graphic gives a pretty real-world example.

There is simply no other iSCSI vendor that can do what Nimble does for the money.

Contact us today if you’d like to discuss Nimble Storage in more detail.

Our Nimble Mini-Site has more info.