HITS

By Jeff Berman and Chris Tribbey

This year at the NAB Show, Caringo will be demonstrating how media and entertainment (M&E) organizations “can leverage object storage to get all the benefits of cloud storage without sending data to a cloud,” according to Adrian Herrera, its marketing VP. “This enables you to optimize media storage, access and protection for post-production, delivery and archive workflows,” he told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA).

Caringo will be providing multiple opportunities for customers and partners to experience “hassle-free storage administration, expansion, and security for rapidly scaling media libraries” at the show, it said. Attendees will be able to see demonstrations of the company’s “integration with leading asset managers, apply for a no-charge 100 TB Swarm software license, and enjoy happy hour with the Caringo team while learning more about hassle-free, limitless storage expansion for their digital assets,” the company said in a news release.

Caringo will have storage experts there who will “showcase how Swarm hassle-free object-based storage can be readily implemented as a target with widely used asset managers including Pixit Media, CatDV and ReachEngine,” Caringo said, adding: “With limitless scale, the ability for 1 administrator to manage hundreds of petabytes, and built-in protection from hacks and ransomware, Swarm is the ideal storage platform for keeping rapidly scaling media libraries securely accessible during all stages of the M&E workflow from creation to delivery and archive.”

Just ahead of the show, Caringo announced a technology partnership with Pixit, certifying Caringo Swarm with the Pixit Media suite.

The combined software-defined approach pairs Pixit’s PixStor and PixStor Ngenea Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) solutions with the Caringo Swarm scale-out object storage platform, “delivering performance, protection and access for every stage of the content workflow from creation to delivery and archive,” Caringo said in its announcement.

For a limited time, Caringo is offering a no-charge, full-featured 100 TB Swarm software license for qualified M&E companies that are “struggling to store, manage, and protect their ever-growing library of digital assets while keeping them securely accessible,” it also said.

Prior to the official start of the NAB Show, Caringo will be featured at the JB&A Pre-NAB Technology event, April 7-8, the company said, calling it a “must-stop event on everyone’s NAB itinerary for a jump-start on the new technologies” that will be seen on the NAB Show floor.

The Caringo booth will also be featured as a stop on the MESA DAM(n) 2018 tour for select M&E executives and content owners, Caringo noted.

Caringo will also be hosting happy hour April 9 and 10, starting at 1:30 p.m. at its booth, providing NAB Show attendees with the opportunity to taste local Las Vegas beer as well as to meet Caringo storage experts and learn more about the 100TB promotion, it said. The 100 TB software license and integration consultation is immediately available to qualified M&E organizations. Interested parties can visit here for more information. SL11807, [email protected]

Among other MESA members representing the workflow solutions space at the 2018 NAB Show:

Digital Bedrock
At the NAB Show, Digital Bedrock will demonstrate “how digital preservation is more than storage and backup,” according to Linda Tadic, founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based digital preservation service provider. “We perform this complex work for clients so they can focus on creation, and sleep better at night knowing their valuable assets are secure and being monitored,” she told MESA.

One difference between Digital Bedrock and many other companies exhibiting at the NAB Show is that it’s a service provider, she noted, explaining: 
“We aren’t selling software licenses or hardware. All other storage solutions require the clients to do the work themselves through licensing or purchasing equipment. In contrast, we perform the detailed, managed preservation work required to keep digital content secure and usable into the future.”

The company’s clients include a major independent Emmy Award-winning studio, director Stephen Soderbergh, producers, film archives, distributors and educational institutions, she pointed out, adding that, at NAB, “we will demo our core applications.”

Digital Bedrock will also “definitely be describing the process of how we preserved” Soderbergh’s film “Logan Lucky,” and will continue on with his latest movie, “Unsane,” and future titles, she said.

The company recently announced an agreement with Soderbergh and his company Fingerprint Releasing, under which Digital Bedrock is preserving the digital masters for “Logan Lucky” and “Unsane.” To preserve the 2017 heist-comedy film “Logan Lucky,” Digital Bedrock analyzed roughly 50 TB of data, covering a variety of file formats, including four versions of OpenEXR image sequences, production sound, final sound mixes, DCPs, and ProRes masters.

The company extracted both technical and embedded metadata to make it searchable, validated formats to help identify obsolescence vulnerabilities, and created SHA-512 checksums (a unique file “fingerprint”) for every file. Nearly 800,000 files were ingested, processed, and indexed.

Files were first collected by Technicolor PostWorks using Digital Bedrock’s curation package tool, and Digital Bedrock will perform ongoing preservation maintenance on the “Logan Lucky” data to ensure its future viability, the company announced. Digital Bedrock will provide similar services for Soderbergh’s 2018 thriller “Unsane,” which hit theaters March 23 in the U.S. SL13408, [email protected]

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure will show off its bevy of cloud storage solutions at the NAB Show, solutions targeted at broadcasters, content creators and publishers looking for easier ways to manage their content and distribution. Azure offers low-cost storage solutions for rarely used, archived data, premium storage for I/O-intensive applications, massively-scalable object storage for unstructured data, and durable queues for large-volume cloud services. SL6716, [email protected]

Oracle
Oracle will bring its DIVA Content Storage Management (CSM) solution to Vegas, an offering that aims to help studios, post-production houses and broadcasters maximize the value of digital content, automate asset management and scale environments to the cloud. Oracle DIVArchive is among the top content storage management applications available, touting more than 1.5 Exabytes under management. DIVArchive integrates with more than 150 workflow and production-enabling partner products, supporting media workflows across distributed on-premise, cloud and hybrid environments. S109LMR, [email protected]

Qumulo
Qumulo will show off its universal-scale file storage offerings, including Qumulo File Fabric (QF2), which gives data-intensive businesses the ability to store, manage and access file-based data in the data center and on the cloud, at petabyte scale. Qumulo currently serves the modern file storage and management needs of approximately 2,000 customers worldwide. QF2 handles both small files and large ones efficiently, and has high sequential and transactional performance. Real-time analytics allows clients to tackle administrative problems immediately, and QF2 is especially ideal for unstructured data workloads in media and entertainment, including VFX, video and animation rendering, transcoding and streaming media. SL10210, [email protected]