Boston partner with Excelero and Pixit Media at NAB to demo joint solution for media workflows

The high-performance, future-proof combined offering to be demoed at NAB 2018
Thursday, 5 April 2018    Source:

London, UK and San Jose, CA - 5th April 2018 - Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage, and Pixit Media, a provider of data intelligent, software-defined scale-out infrastructure solutions, today announced a scale-out, high-performance joint data storage offering designed specifically to accelerate uncompressed 4K, 8K and beyond workflows to meet the current and future requirements of Media & Entertainment (M&E) organisations. The software-defined system, Pixit Media PixStor with Excelero NVMesh, will be showcased at NAB 2018, 7-12 April on Boston Limited Flash-IO Talyn hardware in Pixit Media’s booth #SL6124.

The revolution in high-resolution media technologies is generating an ever-growing wave of uncompressed data that has overwhelmed the throughput capabilities of legacy Fibre Channel and scale-out NAS storage. This is making it increasingly unaffordable for IT teams in M&E organisations to obtain the high levels of performance required by their workstations. Leveraging the benefits of NVMe, Excelero and Pixit Media are responding to this revolution, offering new levels of fast and reliable performance with today's solution announcement.

Pixit Media PixStor with Excelero NVMesh provides over 20 GB/s of centralised direct I/O performance over Ethernet per client for video streaming applications, without the need for buffering. Legacy Fibre Channel architectures would require four times as many connections to achieve this level of performance. A typical PixStor with NVMesh starter configuration includes three NVMesh nodes, delivering 60 GB/s read performance and taking up very little floor space and power in comparison to conventional disk-based storage.

"M&E studios are accumulating vast volumes of data as 4K becomes the default camera resolution and 8K is on the horizon. Together Excelero and Pixit Media are enabling users to enjoy software-defined, high-performance and scale-out storage that both drives down hardware costs and can expand in line with the growth of camera resolutions, frame rates, colour depth and more," said Lior Gal, Excelero CEO and co-founder. "In the past, data storage architectures have always played catch up. We are now able to turn this around and deliver a storage solution that is future-proof."

PixStor is a high-performance and highly scalable enterprise-class system that combines flash, disk, tape and cloud storage into a global namespace seamless for users and designed for M&E workflows. It relies on Excelero NVMesh technology to deliver a unique combination of centralised management, redundancy and high utilisation rates, while maintaining the fast performance and low latency of local NVMe drives. By adding additional NVMe target nodes and drives, PixStor scales out easily and linearly to account for the growing requirements of M&E customers. Uniquely to PixStor with NVMesh, CPU and memory are almost 100% available for applications as there is near zero overhead on the user or the NVMesh target server delivering the performance to the user. What further differentiates the PixStor Excelero solution is PixStor’s single namespace data placement policy engine which automatically tiers data to lower cost storage for high capacity requirements.

“Excelero NVMesh adds a valuable new dimension to PixStor, enabling customers to efficiently maximise utilisation of their NVMe drives. The result is a future-proof storage architecture that enables post-production studios to keep pace with the constant evolution of M&E technology by offering incremental improvements in commodity server, network and NVMe storage technologies over time," said Ben Leaver, Pixit Media CEO and co-founder. "Having assessed a number of NVMe-over-fabric products to replace the end-of-life Dell DSSD D5, Excelero's NVMesh stood out, and testing revealed it vastly sped up data access compared to our previous provider."

The solution will be demoed at NAB on the Boston Flash-IO Talyn which employs technologies such as RoCE v2 and 100Gbit/s EDR InfiniBand or 100GbE from Mellanox’s Connect-X 5 range, processor overhead and latency is kept low, whilst bandwidth is plentiful.

Manoj Nayee, Managing Director at Boston Limited added, “Data storage is the backbone of today's data-driven world. The combined Excelero and Pixit Media software announced today integrates perfectly with our hardware and delivers an ideal solution for M&E companies coping with ever-growing volumes of data. We are delighted to be working closely with Pixit and Excelero to deliver this revolutionary storage platform to our joint customers."

 

About Excelero

Excelero enables enterprises and service providers to design scale-out storage infrastructures leveraging standard servers and high-performance flash storage. Founded in 2014 by a team of storage veterans and inspired by the tech giants’ shared-nothing architectures for web-scale applications, the company has designed a software-defined block storage solution that meets performance and scalability requirements of the largest web-scale and enterprise applications.

With Excelero’s NVMesh, customers can build distributed, high-performance server SAN for mixed application workloads. Customers benefit from the performance of local flash, with the convenience of centralized storage while avoiding proprietary hardware lock-in and reducing the overall storage TCO. The solution has been deployed for hyper-scale Industrial IoT services, machine learning applications and massive-scale simulation visualization.

Follow us on Twitter @Excelerostorage, on LinkedIn or visit us at www.excelero.com to learn more.

ENDS

 

About Pixit Media

Pixit Media provides a modern approach to address the challenges faced by the Post Production, VFX & Broadcast Industries delivering enterprise-class storage infrastructure with a truly software defined approach. By combining the best of breed technologies from on premise into the cloud with a Global view of their data, we empower customers with the freedom of choice, eliminating vendor lock-in and driving efficiencies throughout the end to end workflow. The company has quickly become the de facto standard for Post and Broadcast in the UK, and we are expanding into Europe and the Americas. Our solutions are deployed by leading content creation and distribution organizations around the world. We have been counted on to deliver numerous commercially successful Oscar, BAFTA and Emmy winning TV, Film VFX, CGI, Sports Broadcasts, Commercials and Music Videos.

Visit us at www.pixitmedia.com to find out more.

 

About Boston Limited

Boston Limited has been providing cutting edge technology since 1992 using Supermicro® building blocks. Our high performance, mission-critical server and storage solutions can be tailored for each specific client, helping you to create your ideal solution. From the initial specification, solution design and even full custom branding – we can help you solve your toughest business challenges simply and effectively. www.boston.co.uk @BostonLimited

 

For further information:

For Excelero:

Tom Leyden

Vice President of Corporate Marketing

+1 818 919 8478

[email protected]

 

A3 Communications: EMEA

Federica Monsone/Rachel Neal

+44 (0) 1252 875 203

[email protected]

 

A3 Communications: US

Mary Kae Marinac

+ 1 978-685-313

[email protected]

 

For Pixit Media:

Ben Leaver

CEO & Co Founder, Pixit Media

+44 7748 497 222

[email protected] 

 

For Boston Limited:

Maz Lopez

Head of Marketing

+44 (0) 1727 876100

[email protected]

 

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