HITS

By Jeff Berman and Chris Tribbey –

Members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) representing the storage solutions space at the 2019 NAB Show discussed here include Amazon Web Services, Caringo, Digital Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Qumulo, Teradici, Wasabi and Western Digital.

Here’s a quick look at what each company is bringing to the show:

Amazon Web Services
AWS has a mountain of solutions ready to show off at the NAB Show, not least of which are its Studio in the Cloud and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Studio in the Cloud helps eliminate geographical and capacity constraints via virtual workstations, cloud rendering, and storage for content creation, giving content creators the ability to scale their infrastructure, reduce rendering times, and enable collaboration worldwide.

Amazon S3, an object storage service that offers scalability, data availability, security, and performance, is geared toward allowing customers of all sizes to store and protect any amount of data, covering web sites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, big data analytics and more.

Alex Dunlap, GM of AWS Elemental, will take part in the April 9 panel “Video Storytelling as a Service: How Cloud Helps Broadcasters Streamline and Become Go-to Digital Destinations,” while Hector Leano, industry marketing lead of M&E for AWS, will take part in the April 8 panel “The Future of Transportation.”

On April 9-10 at the Westgate, Amazon Web Services will hold a brand new AWS Workshop event, offering two days of hands-on labs and workshops, geared directly toward the media and entertainment crowd. SU2202

Caringo
At the NAB Show, Caringo will showcase the latest with its content-focused storage platform Swarm, which provides organizations secure access, distribution and long-term retention. With both S3 and NFS access to the same content, Swarm protects files at exabyte scale and enables streaming and longtail video-on-demand, centralized backup, distribution for collaboration and tape replacement, the company said.

Since last year’s NAB, Caringo has introduced a simple way for organizations to get started using Swarm by offering it on the Swarm Single Server Appliance. This new solution was designed to meet the needs of small- to medium-sized content-driven organizations, according to the company. The on-prem, S3-accessible, object-based storage device contains all the hardware and software organizations needed to keep archived content online, searchable, web-accessible and secure, it said. The device requires only one-quarter of the hardware of a typical object storage deployment and organizations can easily scale and add capacity as needed by simply plugging in another appliance, Caringo said.

With several storage experts planning to be on-hand at NAB, the Caringo team will showcase how Swarm can streamline workflows by enabling on-demand access from the archive, it said. The Caringo team will also show integration with widely used asset and content managers.

Caringo will also be featured at the JB&A Pre-NAB Technology Event on Saturday, April 6 and Sunday, April 7, which it said will be 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. SL13310

Digital Bedrock
“Digital Bedrock will showcase how its system intelligently preserves big data, combining object storage methodologies to unstructured data while securely storing assets offline,” Linda Tadic, its CEO and founder, said by email. The company is now “offering a secure, fast direct connection to major cloud storage providers, so clients’ data can also be pushed to/from their cloud storage provider,” she noted, adding: “Clients get the best of both worlds: managed, secure offline preservation with immediate access to files through their cloud storage.” SL10130

Google Cloud
At NAB, Google Cloud will show how its storage solutions are enabling leaders in broadcast across the media supply chain, by integrating storage into apps with a single unified API, optimize price and performance across four storage classes with Object Lifecycle Management, by accessing data instantly from any storage class, and reducing data storage carbon emissions to zero.

John Honeycutt, VP of telecommunications for Google Cloud, will take part in the April 9 panel “The Evolution of Cloud in Media.” SU218, Wynn Salon – F

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure’s cloud storage solutions are geared toward offloading the heavy lifting associated with datacenter management, providing a range of solutions that include flexible, low-cost scalability. Everything from premium, secured disk storage for Azure Virtual Machines to “blob” storage (massively scalable object storage for any type of unstructured data) to LRS file storage (allowing for simple distributed, cross-platform file storage migration, without changing code) is made available.

Mark Miller, senior director of Azure Media & Entertainment at Microsoft, will take part in the April 9 panel “Leveraging SRT and Cloud Broadcast Services to Accelerate Production in the Azure Cloud,” and Azure is a sponsor of the April 7 Cybersecurity & Content Protection Summit, where Joel Sloss, senior lead of media and entertainment security for Microsoft Azure, will present “Get it to the Cloud (Evolving Your Edit Pipeline).” SL6717

Qumulo
“As the leader in Hybrid Cloud Storage, Qumulo will be announcing a major expansion” to its cloud offerings prior to NAB, according to Molly Presley, its global product marketing director. In its NAB booth, the company will demonstrate the industry’s first CloudStudio, “tools to automate and simplify file system analytics, and new performance advancements for intensive rendering and streaming workloads,” she said. SL12111

Teradici
Teradici will collaborate with several partners at NAB to showcase Cloud Access Software delivering editorial and VFX design workloads remotely from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and on-premises private data centers, according to Ziad Lammam, Teradici VP of product management and marketing. “The focus will be our latest Cloud Access Software features – including performance enhancements, management and orchestration service and artist tablet devices – all remotely delivered from a multi-cloud environment,” he said. SL6717

Wasabi
Wasabi will be showcasing its “hot” cloud storage solutions, which promises to deliver low-cost, high-performance storage solutions to enterprises.

The company’s highly scalable and distributed architecture is built at exabyte scale and is 100% compatible with AWS S3. The company has opened data centers in Virginia, Oregon, and Amsterdam, touts itself as the only cloud storage company with no vendor lock-in, and has secured more than 600 solution partners and 200-plus tech partners.

“Since our founding, Wasabi has been pushing the notion of Cloud 2.0, where workloads can move across multiple clouds without friction or added expense in order to deliver the best finished product at the lowest possible price,” said Whit Jackson, Wasabi’s VP of media and entertainment. “We are delighted to be working with all media technology and business innovators who are also committed to enabling the full potential of cloud media processing.” SL14508

Western Digital/G-Technology
Erik Weaver, global director of media and entertainment market development for Western Digital, sees a few trends emerging from the NAB Show this year, including more practical AI applications, better metadata solutions, and more solutions that help companies monetize their content across different platforms.

“The community has realized that digital world has evolved so immensely that they need to start defining and putting parameters on it,” he wrote https://blog.westerndigital.com/whats-hot-at-nab-2019/ in a blog post ahead of the show. “The diversity of formats, tools, data types and metadata usage is creating major workflow challenges, and Hollywood is looking at new standards in an attempt to become consistent, interoperable and future-proof.”

Along with its advanced data centers, mobile sensors, personal devices, and other storage solutions, Western Digital expects to see more interest from attendees for the company’s NVMe (non-volatile memory express) storage offerings.

“Many studios can’t even play content back on an 8K monitor because you need a combination of very advanced infrastructure to even create those pixels, a fast storage medium that can feed that type of data, and network to push that data through,” Weaver wrote. “Everyone is looking at NVMe, and NVMe-over-Fabrics, to understand where they can leverage its incredible speeds and multi-lane approach to help them push data faster and push delivery times.” SL4616