Media & Entertainment

The media and entertainment industries have experienced a digital content explosion, starting with production on the set.  Current camera technologies, with 2K and 4K resolutions, have become a global challenge.   Managing, storing, and archiving have become the number ONE priority for all studios and post-production houses.

Before you are able to view a 90-minute movie on the large screen at the theater or in your living room, there are millions of frames which need to be edited, color that must be corrected, visual effects that require incorporation, and compositing to match the story line.

All editing and color correction need to be done concurrently in the post production facility; with extreme time constraints. The ability to support multi-users and allow them to access all the frames concurrently in real-time, plays an important role in meeting the release deadline.  To review a movie in real-time without skipping a frame requires a massive throughout of 277MB/sec for a 2K environment and 1.2GB/sec at 4K resolution. Building a system to support these requirements is extremely difficult and requires an extensive knowledge of post-production workflow.

Our technical team at Alliance IT has vast experience in supporting these solutions for many years. Entertainment Engineering Magazine has written an article about our team's ability to meet these challenges.

Alliance IT can help your organization build the next HPC system or SAN to support production needs.

The TurboCharger SAN Application Accelerator – Dramatic Boosts in Application Performance

The TurboCharger is a SAN Application Accelerator appliance that boosts the performance of your applications by providing up to 1000 times faster access to application datasets. Achieving maximum performance from revenue-generating applications is critical to the financial success of your company. The explosive growth of enterprise data and the rich, real-time analytics demanded by businesses are challenging the performance of many applications.

Deployed between the application server and storage, the TurboCharger continuously profiles the data access behavior of applications and creates a heuristics-driven map of the data space. I/O server storage requests from applications are fulfilled instantaneously based on the real-time data map, dramatically improving application performance.

The TurboCharger delivers incredible cost savings by allowing you to fully leverage your current storage, servers, databases, applications, processes, and personnel — unlike alternatives that can be expensive, power-consuming, and often require continuous, somewhat disruptive, upgrading.

TurboCharger Features that Leave Nothing to the Imagination

Transparency – Attaches to a SAN switch and is transparent (invisible) to the servers and storage arrays by acting as a Fibre Channel (FC) Proxy.

Virtual Inidicators –  Uses virtual initiators and virtual targets as proxies for real servers and real storage arrays to seamlessly bridge communications between them.

Learning Access Patterns –  Has a hardware processor that analyzes every storage request in real time and gathers statistical information about the requested data.

Availability and Data Integrity –  All writes to the data sets that are covered by the TurboCharger are written through to the storage arrays before the write is acknowledged to the server, ensuring the copy of the data in the storage system is always consistent and up to date.

Deployment –  Deployed between the server and storage, where it continuously profiles the data access behavior of applications and creates a heuristics-driven map of the data space.  I/O requests from the database server are fulfilled instantaneously based on the real-time data map, dramatically improving database performance.

Cost Savings –  By decoupling database performance from the storage layout, the TurboCharger delivers incredible cost savings by allowing you to fully leverage your current storage, servers, databases, applications, processes, and personnel.

Fast –  Your supercomputer-class compute hosts will no longer spend the majority of their time in an I/O wait state; 1000x faster I/O access translates to up to 10x application runtime acceleration.

Seamless – Doesn’t require changes to your existing architecture, application configurations, or operational processes. The TurboCharger accelerates a variety of file server environments including NetApp V-Series, IBM N Series, EMC Celerra, Open Source File Server, GPFS, pNFS, Lustre,Ehcache, and GFS/IBRIX/PolyServe Cluster File Systems.

Easy –  Can be deployed in hours and is simple to maintain. Furthermore, it ‘educates’ itself on your specific hardware and software, realizing faster processing times with each pass of data.

Scalable –  Can handle file servers up to 160 terabytes. If you need more capacity, simply add a BoostPack. The smallest TurboCharger supports 100,000+ IOPS.  Multiple TurboChargers can be scaled to 1 million IOPS and beyond.

Best Choice – Consider the high-performance file server solution, server-based SSD storage, or specialized SSD arrays to enhance I/O performance the TurboCharger delivers.

CanvasRT Tools for Media Professionals

CanvasRT is an all-purpose video production tool to use for capture, ingest, playback, dailies creation, and more. Based on a modular design, CanvasRT can function as an all-in-one box solution or as a very scalable multi-user set of modules.

CanvasRT delivers far more than just the capability for clips to be edited together. Offering full VTR emulation, CanvasRT is essentially every video deck rolled into one, while also acting as a data server and format converter, offering real-time placement and retrieval.   CanvasRT provides unsurpassed performance for bridging numerous gaps in film/video and data workflows.

Designed as an “arrive and play” solution, CanvasRT offers the flexibility to mix resolutions, colorspaces, and even formats in the same project, timelines and playlists, without any prior rendering or transcoding, all in a very straightforward capacity to perform.  Combined with its ease of use, it is powerful and flexible – the perfect answer to our customer’s needs.  CanvasRT is designed for multi-user facilities that need tools for specific purposes but at the same time it gives the one-person shops the same high-end tool-set, without the massive, often complex, infrastructure.

Whether you are an independent film-maker or a billion dollar facility, clarity and continuity will be yours when you use CanvasRT.

RaveHD 2K and DUO Software Solutions

The Rave 2K and RaveDUO suite of software solutions offer a flexible VTR replacement and include many standard features that competitors offer only as options. They can be installed on a variety of hardware configurations and include some primary high-end tools.  Their benefits are realized worldwide, replacing decks in many aspects of the workflow.

RaveDUO software offers the same features as Rave2K, with twice the benefits.  RaveDUO allows you to operate two simultaneous DDRs in one system, independent from each other.

Supporting both compressed and uncompressed 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 formats, the Rave software suite also has the ability to work with non video rasters.  When combined with the proper hardware, the Rave software suite affords the ability to simultaneously work in data mode (as a file server) and as a video device.

Additional Professional Services/Solutions Information:

	High Performance SAN File Systems
	High Performance Storage
	Oil and Gas
	Research
	Government

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