NAB: Joint Storage Solution for Media Workflows From Excelero and Pixit Media

Excelero, Inc. announced a scale-out, performance joint storage offering designed to accelerate uncompressed 4K, 8K and beyond workflows to meet the current and future requirements of media and entertainment ( (M&E) organizations.

The software-defined system, Pixit Media PixStor with Excelero NVMesh, have showcased at NAB 2018 on Boston Limited‘ Flash-IO Talyn hardware in Pixit Media’s booth.

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The evolution in high-resolution media technologies is generating a growing wave of uncompressed data that has overwhelmed the throughput capabilities of legacy FC and scale-out NAS storage. This is making it increasingly unaffordable for IT teams in M&E organizations to obtain the high levels of performance required by their workstations. Leveraging the benefits of NVMe, the company and Pixit Media are responding to this evolution, offering new levels of fast and reliable performance with the joint solution announcement.

PixStor with NVMesh provides over 20GB/s of centralized direct I/O performance over Ethernet per client for video streaming applications, without the need for buffering. Legacy FC architectures would require four times as many connections to achieve this level of performance. A typical PixStor with NVMesh starter configuration includes three NVMesh nodes, delivering 60GB/s read performance and taking up little floor space and power in comparison to conventional disk-based storage.

“M&E studios are accumulating vast volumes of data as 4K becomes the default camera resolution and 8K is on the horizon. Together Excelero and Pixit Media are enabling users to enjoy software-defined, high-performance and scale-out storage that both drives down hardware costs and can expand in line with the growth of camera resolutions, frame rates, colour depth and more,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder, Excelero. “In the past, storage architectures have always played catch up. We are now able to turn this around and deliver a storage solution that is future-proof.“

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PixStor is a performance and scalable enterprise system that combines flash, disk, tape and cloud storage into a global namespace for users and designed for M&E workflows. It relies on NVMesh technology to deliver a combination of centralized management, redundancy and high utilization rates, while maintaining the performance and low latency of local NVMe drives. By adding additional NVMe target nodes and drives, PixStor scales out and linearly to account for the growing requirements of M&E customers. Uniquely to PixStor with NVMesh, CPU and memory are almost 100% available for applications as there is near zero overhead on the user or the NVMesh target server delivering the performance to the user. What further differentiates the PixStor Excelero solution is PixStor’s single namespace data placement policy engine which automatically tiers data to lower cost storage for high capacity requirements.

“Excelero NVMesh adds a valuable new dimension to PixStor, enabling customers to efficiently maximize utilization of their NVMe drives. The result is a future-proof storage architecture that enables post-production studios to keep pace with the constant evolution of M&E technology by offering incremental improvements in commodity server, network and NVMe storage technologies over time,” said Ben Leaver, CEO and co-founder, Pixit Media. “Having assessed a number of NVMe-over-fabric products to replace the end-of-life Dell DSSD D5, Excelero’s NVMesh stood out, and testing revealed it vastly sped up data access compared to our previous provider.“

The solution will be demoed at NAB on the Boston Flash-IO Talyn which employs technologies such as RoCE v2 and 100G/s EDR IB or 100GbE from Mellanox Technology Ltd.‘s Connect-X 5 range, processor overhead and latency is kept low, while bandwidth is plentiful.

Manoj Nayee, MD, Boston Ltd., added: “Storage is the backbone of today’s data-driven world. The combined Excelero and Pixit Media software announced integrates perfectly with our hardware and delivers an ideal solution for M&E companies coping with ever-growing volumes of data. We are delighted to be working closely with Pixit and Excelero to deliver this revolutionary storage platform to our joint customers.”

Joint solution DS