NAB Show 2022 Recap: for Storage, NVMe Everywhere

2022 is definitely the year of the restart following the Covid pandemic and the recent NAB Show 2022 is a good example of it.

The Las Vegas convention center took advantages of this quiet period to redesign its facility and we discovered the new West hall inaugurated with the show. The new hall is just gigantic and people had some difficulties also to understand the new layout of the expo as the South hall was not used as it was in the past. We all remember the BlackMagic gigantic booth on the lower floor for years.

Several inputs from organizers confirmed that the total visitors was 52,468 attendees. It’s less than usual numbers but clearly it is positive for all parties: exhibitors, users, organizers and the city itself.

Spending time essentially in North hall with the majority of data and storage management players with some extensions in Central and West halls, clearly topics of the show were around cloud integration and support, content sharing and delivery with an obvious need to support 4k/8k and of course media archive from a data management and storage perspective.

In terms of components, technologies and products, NVMe was everywhere – not a surprise but more an obvious confirmation – , file-based workflow as every media content is a file finally, S3 support as the natural extension and a bit of tape of course with a dedicated LTO consortium booth, MagStor, Quantum, Spectra Logic, StorageDNA, Symply or XenData as well.

Among tons of interesting stuff announced already  and published on StorageNewsletter.com and displayed by several vendors, here is our selection:

• Archiware added P5 Data Mover into Archiware P5 data management platform,
• Atempo and DataCore jointly announced their mutual support i.e Swarm object storage storage is supported by Miria,
• Atto bundles ThunderLink Thunderbolt adapters with axle.ai cloud media management for Apple MAC Studio,
• BlackMagic unveiled Cloud Store as a NAS limited to SMB file sharing protocol with 4x10GbE ports, Dropbox synchronization, direct HDMI connection, M.2 SSD protected by RAID 5 and for a maximum capacity of 320TB,
• Ciphertex displayed secured NAS systems with everything encrypted with AES-256 running Ubuntu and ZFS,
• EditShare demonstrated FLEX for Sync and Edit, cluster to cluster replication and analytics,
• Elements has promoted his comprehensive SAN and NAS portfolio and its integration with AIS and Quantum StorNext,
• Facilis has shown an arsenal of solutions and its recent WANLink client, security enhancements with Smart Access Rules and Delete Restore among others,
• Hammerspace shared its new logo, promoted its Jellyfish customer win and we already saw Molly Presley’s impact,
• Liqid continues its industry coverage with NVMe ad GPU support and flexibility and performance of real-time built infrastructure by its Matrix software,
• Nyriad displayed its recent added GPU-based RAID card,
• OpenDrives has insisted on Atlas Core relying on specific design leveraging Debian and OpenZFS available now for scale-up, scale-out or mix configs,
• Open Source Storage, not to be confused with One Stop Systems having the same acronym, has promoted its media archive platform,
• Promise Technology demonstrated FileBoost and TierBoost in addition to V-Track N-Series especially the N-1008 and N1616 and Pegasus Series,
• Qnap showcased various models of NAS dedicated to video professionals and content creators,
• Quantum has maximized its presence with 3 announcements: the F2100 as a 2U 24 NVMe SSDs with dual-controller, the H4000 appliance coupling CatDV MAM and StorNext 7 on the same platform and finally an integration with Nvidia and CatDV to enhancement and enrich video content,
• Qumulo unveiled its 1PB free cloud program to accelerate cloud adoption, it is free for a limited of time and finally confirmed as well its own S3 development with currently a read-only mode as the same level its other access methods reside,
• Seagate has made some noise with Lyve product line and its cloud offering,
• Spectra Logic displayed of course tape libraries and promoted Vail, BlackPearl …
• Western Digital has insisted on SanDisk and G-Drive/G-Raid products,
• XenData partners with axle.ai to offer search at scale for the XenData X100 media archive.

In terms of awards 2022 related to our industry, we noticed OpenDrives Atlas Core, Seagate Exos CORVAULT and Spectra Logic with Vail.

We even saw and met several people from companies not exhibiting but visiting partners, present at some booth wishing to see if the show was good. We understand that some companies had some hesitations to participate and some famous names were absents. This is the case for Komprise, Iodyne, Object Matrix, StoneFly, Tiger Technology or Weka to name a few.

It was a good restart meaning that the next one should be aligned with classic format and we also have strong expectations for IBC in September in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.