Archion Storage Selected by CBS Television Distribution

In television syndication. CBS Television Distribution (CBS) has selected Archion Technologies‘s Synergy UXE storage solution to expand its Avid Unity MediaNetwork for two of its shows, the highly rated court show Judge Joe Brown, and the new Swift Justice with Nancy Grace. 

Increasing its storage by a factor of 10, the three new 32 terabyte (TB) Synergy UXE systems from Archion Technologies provide CBS with a total of 96TBs of storage, including 72 TBs of usable storage (RAID 5 protected).

After the decision was made to go tapeless for the 220 episodes of this season’s Judge Joe Brown show, a major upgrade to their storage was required, explained industry consultant Joel Epps, who helped architect the overall solution. CBS has three Avid Media Composer software desktop stations, two Avid Media Composers with Avid Mojo, one Avid Nitris, and one Avid Symphony Nitris. They also made a decision to upgrade their Avid Unity to the Media Engine 5.1x.

To effectively post Judge Joe Brown, they needed the ability to store at least half a season before archiving the media, Epps noted.  On the other hand, for Swift Justice with Nancy Grace, they needed more flexibility because video comes in from a variety of sources. This requires both more storage and quick access to the media – both of which Synergy UXE provides.

"CBS wisely chose Archion because of three important factors – budget, scalability, and protection," said Epps. "They were all set on upgrading their Avid Unity and needed a minimum of 48 usable TBs of protected storage. However, by choosing the Archion Synergy UXE, they were able to add substantially more protected storage to their Unity Media Engine than if they had purchased Avid storage with the same budget. The Archion cost/benefit ratio was too good to ignore, and at the same time, they didn’t sacrifice quality, performance, or data protection."

"Archion clearly provided better value in terms of cost per useable TB," he continued. "CBS would have had to purchase up to six Avid chassis, but this requirement was met with just two Archion chassis, cutting the cost by more than 50%. They also provided better recovery in the event of a drive failure."

James Tucci, Archion’s Chief Technology Officer and a post production storage pioneer with more than 25 years of experience, explained that it was important to fully understand CBS’s goal of upgrading their legacy Unity to accommodate their capacity and scalability requirements while providing more reliable bandwidth.

"After consulting with CBS, I learned their immediate requirement was for 48TBs of protected storage, but they expected these two productions to require much more than 64TBs," he said. "With Avid storage, they would have been limited to 64TBs of protected storage, whereas Archion storage allowed them to scale their capacity to 128TBs."   

"We are delighted that CBS appreciated the value of our hardware RAID protection and were compelled by the fact they could get RAID storage with their Unity without compromising workflow and performance," added Reuben Lima, Archion’s Chief Operating Officer. "This decision by CBS further confirms the confidence surrounding our technology and our highly trained support staff, who are prepared to address any Unity-related questions."  

The Synergy UXE
In addition to Archion’s line of RAID storage for Avid’s Unity MediaNetwork and Media Engine platforms, Synergy UXE extends the Synergy’s abilities to 800 MB/second and has increased its capacity to 32TBs in a single chassis for Unity Media Engine (5.x).

The Synergy UXE’s Unity compatibility and abilities are designed for Unity Media Engine 5.x, it is also certified for use with Unity Media Networks (v3.5 – 4.2x). Keeping the Synergy standard of legacy compatibility, the Synergy UXE is compatible with 1 Gig, 2 Gig and 4 Gig Unity and with other Archion-certified Unity add-on storage systems.

Synergy UXE storage systems deliver 8-, 16- or 32 TB of storage in a compact three-rack unit design with a 16-drive chassis.  With its built-in, highly intelligent hardware RAID controller to manage storage more efficiently, the Synergy UXE automatically rebuilds a faulty drive so that the rest of the network is unaffected by the drive failure.

With Synergy UXE, multiple chassis can be attached to a Unity 5.1 to deliver the maximum capacity of 128TBs of usable protected storage, and it can also help maximize the Unity 4.2x with nearly 40TBs of protected storage.

With the patent-pending Vdisk technology, Archion ensures compatibility between versions and that operation is transparent to the Unity system. All Synergy UXE systems are pre-configured so they can just be plugged into the storage port on a Unity and a data set can be added to or created.

Archion’s hardware RAID controller consistently checks, identifies, and repairs drive errors while ensuring constant data flow. If one of the enterprise-class drives should fail to perform, the hot spare drive kicks in automatically and rebuilds the data. Clients continue to work, log off and log on as normal without interfering with the Unity operation. The Synergy UXE RAID controller manages the disk drives, RAID sets, and Vdisks in a more efficient manner, requiring fewer drives than Avid storage subsystems to deliver higher capacities and resolutions.

The Synergy UXE hardware RAID controller provides better protection with less storage overhead than Unity RAID. All Synergy UXE’s are configured in RAID level 5 to provide more than 60% more usable storage than mirroring.