How has MediaGrid 2.2 changed from the previous version?
MediaGrid originally shipped two years ago and we’re now on version 2.2. It’s more robust and better-suited for post-production than the previous software version. It was robust and durable and secure for broadcast when it came out, but what we’ve done in the last 12 months is focus on post-production workflows: shared edit workflow and a repurposing workflow. The shared edit workflow includes support for both Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer.
What about the repurposing workflow?
On the repurposing side, we’ve redefined repurposing or transcoding by putting the transcode performance right into the storage. So the clustered filing system includes not only storage capacity, but also grid processing. So right within the storage capacity is grid processing, which is scalable from about 6 cores intel to 100 CPU cores in one storage system. So when we perform transcoding we can do that across a grid of CPUs and therefore perform even HD transcoding at much faster than real time. And we do that by taking a clip to be transcoded and breaking that up into short segments and having each CPU transcode a segment of that clip and then we reassemble the clip.
What kind of security do you have built into the MediaGrid system?
Let’s start with resiliency. The clustered file system was designed from the ground up to be highly resilient and highly available, because the initial focus of the product was to make it work as a staging system for broadcasters, so the material in the system was, oftentimes, very close to going on air so broadcasters don’t want to lose the content that they’re about to put live. So we decided to build the system using inexpensive off-the-shelf parts in terms of the hardware-the hard disk drives, the intel and Linux servers in and of themselves are not expensive components-but to use SATA drives in an environment that needs to be highly available and highly secure, we built resiliency into the system by making a copy of every file. So, ultimately, there’s no single point of failure. A disk drive or entire little content server could fail and we would still have copies of everything.
Also built into the system is a self-healing property, so that if a drive does fail, and all of the pieces of files that were on that disk drive are lost, there are copies of those pieces somewhere else in the system. The MediaGrid knows where those copies are and automatically starts a copying process such that all the pieces of the files that were lost are rereplicated such that we get back into a situation of having 2 copies of everything again very rapidly. Whereas a RAID array may take as long as 25 hrs to rebuild, we can rereplicate in a failure situation in a matter of about 10 minutes.
Is that rereplicating ability unique to Omneon?
It is fairly unique to omneon. There are other companies doing this, but not in post-production or broadcast. We’re unique in our use of our slicing technology or dynamic data replication model.