Avid Expands Media Storage Capacity and Performance With Nexis Systems

Avid Technology, Inc. announced innovations for Nexis software-defined storage platform designed for storing and managing media are available.

Nexis software-defined storage systems

Powered by the MediaCentral Platform, an open integrated platform designed for media, Nexis|HA options and enhanced scalability for Nexis|Enterprise systems provide reliability, performance and storage capacity for the demanding large-scale broadcast and post-production environments.

As part of firm’s commitment to offering a comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to create, distribute and optimize media, Nexis scalability enhancements double the capacity of Nexis|Enterprise systems. It supports up to 48 media packs across a single scale-out enterprise system, enabling customers to mix and match a combination of Nexis|E5, E4, and E2 engines, whether for new installations or integrated with their existing Isis systems.

With this release, customers can scale the Nexis system’s total capacity up to nearly 3PB of total storage with up to 19.2Gb/s of bandwidth, capable of delivering 250 streams of Sony XAVC-Intra 59p UHD or more than 680 streams of DNxHD-220 media.

This scale out features build upon the previously announced Nexis HA options-including the Redundant Storage Controller, Redundant System Director, and Redundant Networking – protect mission-critical productions against potential hardware performance issues. Nexis Media Mirror Protection protects an entire Nexis system against any five simultaneous disk failures, and even an entire engine failure.

“Media organizations need more robust storage infrastructure, greater reliability and control, and closer collaboration in order to create high-quality and engaging content,” said Alan Hoff, VP, market solutions, Avid. “These new innovations for Avid NEXIS deliver the most resilient storage system in the industry with unmatched scalability, together with HA options that address these needs and boost operational efficiency.“

Thanks to the openness of MediaCentral, Nexis solutions work with media creation applications, including Media Composer, Pro Tools, Apple Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Grass Valley EDIUS.

Production teams can quickly access a shared pool of virtualized storage resources, which increases their efficiency-a testament to the media-savvy collaboration capabilities Nexis delivers.

“Our clients primarily use Avid editing solutions, but we need the versatility to offer alternative workflows,” said Ollie Stratton, technical consultant and head, Video Europe‘s edit department. “The fact [that] [Avid] NEXIS has the ability to natively support Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Black Magic’s DaVinci Resolve, is a real leap forward for flexible, open workflows.“

Nexis enables dynamic virtualization so media organizations can adjust storage capacity mid-project, without disrupting workflows. Customers can select components that meet their current needs, and grow as their needs change.

Nexis is a scale-out storage solution with adaptive protection, enabling customers to dynamically tune the system to ensure that high-priority workflows always have the capacity, performance and data protection levels they require. Customers can give critical projects maximum performance, while throttling back on less critical workflows. This ability lets teams react quickly to changes, adjusting performance and protection levels to match the needs of a project at any stage in the workflow.

As part of company’s commitment to offering flexible deployment models, the firm offers a range of Nexis|Enterprise systems, including the hyper-dense Nexis|E5 storage engine, the Nexis|E4 high-density storage engine and the Nexis|E2 small-footprint storage engine.

Nexis enhanced scalability and the following Nexis HA options are available:

• Redundant Storage Controller

• Redundant System Director

• Redundant Networking

• Media Mirroring