Archion and Elite Avid Resellers Partner

With the limited availability of Avid Unity MediaNetwork storage products, Archion Technologies remains prepared to deliver what will become an option for Avid Unity users that need to expand their storage capacity now or in the future.

Archion’s Synergy with its patent pending Vdisk technology offers integration into Unity MediaNetwork storage systems.

Today, thousands of satisfied clients around the world are utilizing Synergy storage on Unity MediaNetworks 3.5 – 5.x. These include broadcasters like CBS, Fox Networks and Turner Broadcast, studios like Sony and 20th Century Fox Films as well as smaller independent facilities. Synergy solutions are sold primarily through elite Avid resellers.

"Our focus is to keep our clients ahead of technology and effectively manage the life cycle of their investments," said Mike Cavanagh, President of Key Code Media in Burbank, CA, one of Avid’s largest resellers. "With that mindset of providing value to our clients, we see Archion’s Synergy as the only proven option for expanding Avid Unity MediaNetworks, and RAID protection is an important benefit. It offers seamless integration into the Avid workflow with a strong investment protection."

"With thousands of customers worldwide, Avid’s Unity MediaNetwork remains the most widely used storage for Avid workflows, and we remain firmly committed to offering the best solutions for preserving those customer investments," said Reuben Lima, Chief Operating Officer of Archion. "Large numbers of Avid customers invested in their Media Engine between 2009 and 2011, many as recently as this summer. They deserve the option of expanding the capacity without requiring an expensive, time-consuming forklift upgrade and the risk of media loss."

"We have more than five years of experience delivering expansion storage to Unity MediaNetwork clients," he added. "And we remain firmly committed to continuing our support of the Avid Unity platform."  

Experience Taking MediaNetworks to Another Level
Archion’s Synergy shared storage product line is the result of an experience in providing Avid Unity MediaNetwork-based solutions. It offers performance RAID protected add-on storage for Avid Unity MediaNetworks, while offering integration and compatibility without changing the popular Unity workflow. Synergy establishes a new standard in scalability for MediaNetworks, making it a solution that can deliver the maximum capacity of 128TB of usable protected storage on Media Engines 5.1x and 40TB of protected storage on version 4.2x.

MediaNetwork customers benefit by expanding with Synergy. Upon upgrading to 5.1x, CBS, for example, added a Synergy system to expand its Avid Unity MediaNetwork for two of its shows, the highly rated Judge Joe Brown and the new Swift Justice with Nancy Grace.

Increasing its storage by a factor of 10, Synergy provides CBS with a total of 128TBs of storage, including 96TBs of usable storage (RAID 5 protected). With Avid storage, it would have been limited to 64TBs of protected storage.

Another facility, Wild Eyes Productions in Hermosa Beach, CA, recently added 96TBs of Synergy storage to its Avid Unity MediaNetwork. Wild Eyes’ track record in television, documentary and docu-reality filmmaking balances military documentaries like Inside Al-Qaeda and Inside the Taliban for National Geographic with reality TV series like The Squad: Prison Police for the A&E Network.

"Simply put, Archion’s Synergy has proven to be a lifesaver for us," said Conor Morris, Post Production Supervisor at Wild Eyes, which has 96TBs of Synergy storage and requires it all to be protected. "Synergy was much more cost-effective than Avid or the other solutions we looked at, it runs off of the same Unity interface and it worked flawless right out of the box."

Vdisk with Advanced Storage Technologies
Archion engineers created the patent pending Vdisk with storage technologies that enable plug-and-play integration of hardware parity RAID into Unity storage systems without changing the workflow. The 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.

Synergy provides better protection with less storage overhead than Unity RAID. Because Synergy is configured in RAID 5, the need to mirror storage or compromise media is eliminated, which can provide 60% more usable storage than mirroring. Incredibly, Unity MediaNetwork owners can save more than 70% per protected TB when adding Synergy storage.

With its built-in hardware 4 or 8GB RAID controller to manage storage efficiently, Synergy automatically rebuilds a faulty drive to eliminate downtime and keep the rest of the network unaffected by a drive failure. Archion’s system checks, identifies and repairs drive errors while ensuring constant data flow. If one of the drives should fail, the hot spare drive kicks in to automatically and rebuild the data. Clients continue to work and log on and off as normal without affecting the Unity operation. Synergy also comes with a two-year hardware warranty, twice Avid’s one-year warranty.

"As part of our strong commitment to technical support and investment protection, we have more than a decade of experience supporting Unity clients with a dedicated team of Unity MediaNetwork experts," said James Tucci, Chief Technology Officer of Archion. "Support is available 24/7, and parts can be advance replaced for next day delivery. In addition, several regions have local spares for same day delivery. In fact, we find our engineers spending more time supporting Unity than Archion storage."

White paper on hardware RAID protection in Avid Unity environment