NAB: Quobyte Eliminates Content Silos With Hyperscale Storage Software for M&E Collaboration

Quobyte Inc. announced the availability of its parallel distributed file system to meet the performance, scalability, and collaboration challenges of the media and entertainment (M&E) industry.

Quobyte unified storage diagram

The company’s executives and technologists have demonstrated this game changing storage software during the NAB Show.

For broadcasters, studios, and post production facilities facing continuing budget constraints and manpower reductions due to industry consolidation, Quobyte is leveraging hyperscaler technology to unify file, block, and object storage. Each person in the workflow, whether on a Mac, Windows, or Linux machine can access the same rich media asset with standard industry software applications or a Media Asset Management (MAM) infrastructure. This allows post production, visual effects, and playout workflows to reduce administrative overhead while providing secure data integrity for collaboration across the entire workflow chain.

“Increased collaboration and productivity for both end users and administrators is at the heart of Quobyte’s unified storage access architecture,” said Björn Kolbeck, CEO and co-founder, Quobyte. “Quobyte provides a single scalable storage platform for seamless collaboration through a local, wide area, or global network. This eliminates needlessly copying, exporting, transcoding, and uploading files between systems and platforms in post-production and VFX workflows. Videos can also be stored in any format for playout, streaming, and CDN origin storage.“

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The software is self-managing and self-healing, freeing administrators from the labor-intensive task of monitoring the data integrity of their ever-increasing storage environment. The system continuously monitors and detects hardware failures, operator errors, network partitions, and disk corruption. End-to-end checksums protect all file data, metadata, and communications, providing superior data integrity and eliminating the need for hardware and software RAID controllers.

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“The system installs in minutes, new hardware is found and provisioned automatically, and the built-in fault tolerance and rebalancing of resources, enables 24/7 operation with no need for human intervention,” continued Kolbeck. “We haven’t found the limit yet for how much storage one person can administer with Quobyte software, but an organization is more likely to add a person for organizational rather than for capacity or storage management reasons. That’s a win-win for all.“

“With ever larger amounts of data to manage and with fewer personnel resources, IT managers and CIOs are looking for solutions that allow them to manage more data without greater costs,” added Tom Coughlin, president, Coughlin Associates and publisher of the annual Digital Storage in Media and Entertainment Report ($7,000). “Solutions such as Quobyte’s distributed file system with automated data handling can help IT professionals cope with ever growing content assets.“

Kolbeck concluded: “Our teams’ experience allows us to bring hyperscale performance, self-healing, and scalability optimized for commodity servers to the M&E industry. Quobyte is utilizing its considerable expertise to help solve the industry’s formidable performance, capacity, and collaboration challenges brought on by complex and difficult to integrate ecosystems, increased pixel depth/frame rates, and the evolving IP-video landscape.“

Company’s M&E solutions