NAB: Excelero Helped Film and TV Production Technicolor Scale Up, Out and Beyond 4K

As media and entertainment firms adopt 4K formats and 60fps high frame rates, with even higher resolution content like 8K and 16K formats on the horizon, Excelero, Inc. announced that it is helping film and TV legends to deliver dazzling work, more readily and cost-effectively.

Excelero’s NVMesh software-defined block storage solution with its low-latency and high-bandwidth improves the interactive editing process and enables customers to stream high-resolution video without dropping frames.

A worldwide technology company in media and entertainment production, Technicolor achieved 99.8% of local NVMe storage server performance across the network in an initial use of NVMesh.

“The IT infrastructure required to feed dozens of workstations of 4K files at 24ps is mindboggling – and that doesn’t even consider what storage demands we’ll face with 8K or even 16K formats,” said Amir Bemanian, engineering director, Technicolor. “It’s imperative that we can scale to future film standards today. Now, with innovations like the shared NVMe storage such as Excelero provides, Technicolor can enjoy a hardware-agnostic approach, enabling flexibility for tomorrow while not sacrificing performance.“

Excelero and its partners will be showcasing Excelero’s benefits for ‘Any-K’ storage and demonstrate 16K post-production workflows at NAB 2018, April 7-12 in Las Vegas, NV at the following locations:

Quantum Corp. which is showcasing the integration of Excelero’s NVMesh solution with its StorNext shared storage and data management platform to deliver industry performance and efficiency. It will be demonstrating 4K, 8K and 16K solutions leveraging NVMesh.
Intel Corp. showcasing both its Intel 3D NAND SSD line and Intel NVMe SSDs with a 16K format application, and its joint work with Excelero on Technicolor’s ‘Any-K’ major film and TV production deployment has enabled a novel application of GPFS storage made even more performant and scalable with Excelero’s shared NVMe at local performance. More about Excelero’s joint work with Intel is provided in Intel’s booth. “We are excited that Intel 3D NAND SSDs with NVMe and 64-layer technology are at the core of this innovative solution that brings an entire industry greater time- and cost- efficiency,” said Bill Leszinske, Intel corporate VP, non-volatile memory solutions group.
M ell ano x Technologies, Ltd where Excelero’s results with Technicolor are showcased in Mellanox’s booth. “Legacy FC storage fabrics simply cannot scale to deliver modern data center requirements,” said Amit Katz, VP, Ethernet switching, Mellanox. “The Mellanox 16 port SN2100 100GbE switch and RoCE delivers the needed performance and latency characteristics which support Technicolor’s demanding environment today and into the future.“

“All-flash arrays (AFAs) are not the only option on the market for demanding storage applications,” said Eric Burgener, research director, IDC. who follows next-generation rack-scale storage architectures. “As enterprises move away from legacy networking like FC and SCSI, and toward NVMe, efficiency at scale is a huge differentiator, and the foundation of a competitive advantage.”

“Post-production and film industry leaders need innovations that can carry them into the future where larger formats and higher frame rates keep pushing the thresholds of throughput and latency on storage systems,” said Billy Russell, VP and CTO, Alliance Integrated Technology, LLC (AIT). “Excelero and AIT are exactly the partners to deliver the scale-out, hardware-agnostic storage that media and entertainment industry leaders know they need – with Excelero’s NVMesh providing the almost limitless performance scalability and ultra-low latency, and savvy integration services from AIT making it a reality.“

“Stunning entertainment experiences happen in part because savvy technology teams put the unseen, back-end components in place for production companies to succeed,” said Lior Gal, CEO and co-founder, Excelero. “We’re proud that Excelero’s NVMesh has the exceptional performance, scalability and flexibility that Hollywood legends like Technicolor and technology leaders like Quantum, Intel, Mellanox and AIT can help achieve impressive results that carry them into a new, high-resolution, high frame-rate era.“