Emmy Award-winning Biscardi Creative Media Selects Atto

ATTO Technology, Inc., a provider of storage connectivity and infrastructure solutions for data-intensive computing environments, announced that their ExpressSAS RAID Adapter used in conjunction with Maxx RaidPro storage arrays has been selected by Biscardi Creative Media to deliver high-performance processing and data protection for production-class, high-definition digital video across the studio environment.

Biscardi Creative Media is an award-winning production company based in Atlanta, Georgia that has collected many Emmy, Telly, Aurora and Cable Ace Awards for excellence in high-definition broadcast/post production. With projects such as Food Network’s popular series “Good Eats”, and “This American Land” for PBS, a production company like this can’t afford to invest in a storage solution that’s not reliable enough to handle an increasing broadcast HD/SD post-production workload.

Biscardi was testing many new SAS/SATA arrays when he noticed MaxxDigital provided the ATTO ExpressSAS RAID adapter as part of their direct-attached solution. Offering parity protection and seamless integration into SATA storage, the low-profile ExpressSAS R380 provides 3-Gb SATA/SAS connectivity with integrated RAID support and flexible port configurations. The R380 is engineered for the most demanding digital media applications, satisfying data protection requirements in a high-performance environment.

“With so much broadcast work and other deadline intensive projects, we simply cannot afford to have any storage issues,” says owner Walter Biscardi. “Is the storage going to be there when I turn it on tomorrow?” Biscardi Creative was using an older 2TB Fibre Channel array that had been their workhorse for 2 years, but they knew the time had come to expand their storage capacity. To address the problem, Biscardi evaluated several SATA and FireWire 800 arrays, but “we simply could not find a good speed in the available SATA options.”

With the risk of losing data in a high-definition media environment, an affordable, high-performance solution was needed that added data protection and could be seamlessly integrated into a SATA storage environment. Walter and his team had purchased and tested many different brands of storage solutions. Unfortunately, they were running into the same problem: too many issues with storage, especially when it came to reliability. As Walter found out, “Fast speeds are nice, but when arrays disappear off the desktop or just fail for no particular reason, all the speed in the world doesn’t matter.”

“In pre-testing, we found that the R380 contributed to speeds of almost double of what was provided by the competition. By using the R380 RAID adapter to directly connect to the Maxx SATA RaidPro 8TB array, we are able to obtain Write speeds of 488MB/sec. and Read speeds of 429MB/sec. in a RAID 5 configuration using a 4-Gb file and 1920×1080 10-Bit RGB frame size. Additionally, customer support was very helpful, resulting in an easy setup to ensure we got the highest speed possible for both uncompressed and compressed HD editing,” says Biscardi. The solution helped them achieve their objectives because, according to Biscardi, it was “the best combination of speed and protection in RAID 5 mode.”

“The video-optimized solution offers editors the ability to achieve multiple streams of uncompressed HD video with high-level RAID 5 protection. The stability and high-throughput achieved with this solution comes at an extraordinarily inexpensive cost,” states Ron Amborn of Maxx Digital.

ATTO Technology, Inc.