InFrame Designs Deploys Fusion ioMemory

Fusion-io, Inc. announced that InFrame Designs, provider of custom-built media servers to accelerate playback of video at live media events, has deployed Fusion's ioMemory technology in its appliances to reduce latency by up to 100 times when compared to InFrame's previous architecture.



The latency reduction and an additional six-fold application performance improvement delivered by Fusion-io VSL software and ioMemory led the company to build Fusion-io technology into upcoming Vixen media server models.

The InFrame Vixen media servers are designed for real-time, on-demand compositing of multiple raw video input sources. The technology is used in data-intensive, live media environments where the pre-rendering of imagery is simply not possible. The InFrame Vixen media servers are behind some of the largest and most complex television and live-event productions in Canada, including Battle of the Blades from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, the Canadian Juno Awards, and many others.

"The extremely low latency of the Fusion-io technology has allowed us to access the essential early frames of video that were previously lost in the compositing process because of the lag-time associated with shared storage technology," said Alex Nadon, President and Founder of InFrame Designs. "By deploying Fusion-io, we were able to improve our production values and deliver better content to our media partners at a much lower cost, while also using less physical space on site. With Fusion-io, we can deliver incredible content to our broadcast customers in near real time to enrich the entertainment experiences of national audiences."

The video library InFrame requires for rendering live video at events can exceed 80 GB, far greater than can be cached in RAM. In addition, the latency associated with shared storage meant that the initial frames of a requested video were not provided in time to be displayed on air. As system responsiveness is critical during live events, Fusion's microsecond latency was key to improving InFrame's creative capabilities.

"Producing outstanding content at live events requires incredible amounts of data to be processed as quickly as possible, and in these environments, latency can keep creative ideas from becoming real-world possibilities," said Vincent Brisebois, entertainment product manager at Fusion-io. "The forward-thinking team at InFrame has solved these challenges to conduct even live video rendering by integrating ioMemory technology into their systems to achieve such remarkable reductions in latency and improvements in performance."