Omneon and Vizrt Integrate Active Storage and Asset Management

Omneon, Inc. and Vizrt, Ltd. announced that their flagship products for active storage and media asset management, the MediaGrid and the Viz Ardome family respectively, have been integrated and successfully tested together. The combined systems deliver a streamlined workflow for media operations. The Omneon media servers provide ingest and playout functionality with the MediaGrid acting as central storage, and the Viz Ardome system oversees all management of media operations, directing the flow from ingest through archiving including production and playout.

Vizrt’s Viz Ardome is a comprehensive asset management system that allows demanding media operations to automate and streamline the movement of content through the operation, and in large enterprises provides the ability to easily manage and repurpose content as necessary through the production workflow. Since the MediaGrid is able to achieve aggregate file access speeds far greater than traditional network-attached storage systems, the efficiency of overall operations is greatly improved. Also, the MediaGrid features the ability to granularly scale bandwidth along with capacity, so in combination with Viz Ardome, users can tailor systems to their specific needs and expand as they grow.

"There has been a significant increase of digital media being used not just by traditional broadcasters and media companies, but also for corporate communications and on the Web," said Geoff Stedman, vice president, worldwide marketing for Omneon. "Sophisticated asset management systems like Vizrt’s Viz Ardome are the key to utilizing resources across an entire operation. Media content is only as valuable as the user’s ability to access and use it, and our combined solution helps our customers optimize the value of their content."

Besides the scalable bandwidth and capacity needed for demanding applications, the MediaGrid provides superior redundancy over traditional RAID solutions through its dynamic data redundancy (DDR) technology. Recovering data following the loss of a drive is faster than RAID by an order of magnitude, greatly reducing any periods of file system vulnerability.

"The high performance and availability of MediaGrid are crucial to building and managing an automated workflow around centralized active storage," said Jonas Engstrom, executive vice president of product management for Vizrt. "Unlike generic storage solutions, MediaGrid was designed specifically for the demands of media applications, providing scalable capacity, bandwidth, and media processing in one easy-to-maintain package. That is what sets MediaGrid apart, and now makes it easy for us to build systems that are tailored to the specific needs of a given operation."

Omneon, Inc.

Vizrt, Ltd.