Building Storage to Hold RED

How did Globalstor get started?

I was in the disk drive repair industry in the mid to late 80s As Globalstor Data we’ve been around since 1997, but we’ve been around as Global Remarketing, an end-of-life solutions provider since the late 80’s. Our former focus was asset reclamation; we would buy inventories. We changed direction when the market became tougher for that and started to come up with our own Globalstor brand solutions and product lines. We started with the optical products and worked our way into RAID and server-based solutions for the post-production industry. We’re pretty much customer-driven. That’s been the driving factor: our customers are partners saying we need this and we assess what we need to make it happen.

Is that how the RED line get started?

Pretty much. RED content came out and needed serious processing power to do it that wasn’t something you could just do with off-the-shelf components. There was a lot of twearking involved beyond the OS to be able to accommodate that.

Do you have any upgrades planned for the RED line?

For the ExtremeSTOR REDe, on the storage architecture side we’re still very similar, however on the motherboard side we’re in the process of releasing our next generation solution. We’re incorporating the Intel’s latest Nehalem architecture which gives us more bang for the buck. It gives us better performance overall with various compatibility with a lot of different RED formats. The different setting of the RED can impact playback performance so we’re able to overcome a lot of that with the new architecture. And our new products will feature quad core processors, single and dual processor configurations.

We’re planning to eventually incorporate this new REDe architecture into all of our lines, so also in the ExtremeSTOR DI.

What other new products do you have in the works?

We’re also working no with Adobe as Adobe’s releasing some plug-ins for the CS4. We’re also building solutions for that which will be releasing in the coming weeks. These will be focused on the lower end of the RED stuff and won’t necessarily incorporate internal storage that we have on the ExtremeSTOR product line.

Will you be at NAB?

We’ve deviated away from the big booth at NAB, but we will be there scattered about. We’ll be partnering with several software companies and focusing on the RED workflow.