Shawn Klein

Can you start with a brief rundown of what StorNext is?

There are really two components to StorNext. It’s all software so our partners supply servers and storage and all the other cool stuff that goes with it. From a software component side, there are two pieces: the StorNext File System and the StorNext Storage Manager. The StorNext File System is a shared file system, meaning that it sits on a SAN, storage area network, and manages the primary disk. By "manages" I mean, whatever the capacity is of the disk, it presents it as a local direct attached storage to the operating system. Our unique value proposition is that we can support Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac connectivity all at the same time. The second piece is the StorNext Storage Manager which is a policy-based data mover.  Users set policies to have their data moved when they want, and where they want; be it disk or tape-based storage devices.

Can you provide an example of how StorNext can enhance your system?

Well, let’s say someone isn’t using StorNext, but plain direct-attached storage instead and they’re editing a TV commercial that’s 1TB big. If someone’s doing the color correction on a LINUX machine, then they’d have to do that and then they’d have to pass to a Mac for FCP editing. Passing 1TB across a network is very slow. Not only that, but then the Mac has to have 1TB of free space to accept that file. But, if you use StorNext File System all users can see the file at the same time.

How does the check-in check-out system work?

Well, it doesn’t necessarily check-in and check-out the files like you would expect. It actually is just the file sitting out there and depending on the applications we can actually share the same file from two different applications on two different platforms at the same time.

Interesting. How do you prevent simultaneous changes on the same piece?

Well, that’s kind of our secret sauce. I say “depending on the applications,” because the applications have to be block-aware rather than just reading by file-name. If applications are dealing with files, we’ll lock the whole file rather than writing to it and then when they’re done, we’ll unlock it again. But, if by chance, there were two applications that could do block-level locking rather than file-level locking, then we can have the two applications work on the same file at the same time.

It seems like a forward-thinking idea!

In many ways this solution came to us. We’ve been solving this problem for many years in the satellite imaging industry. Our customers have also been using StorNext for many years in the seismic data collection for oil and gas. These industries have the same problem—very large files that need to be shared and retained for long periods of time. When multimedia became digital we were in the sweet spot to solve this problem for them.

And how does your other major software component, the StorNext Storage Manager, work in conjunction with the file system?

The StorNext Storage Manager is an option to the StorNext File System—it’s a policy-based data mover. What that means is you can set policies based on a directory. So lets say you have a folder in your StorNext environment and on that folder you set a policy that says, I want you to take the data that dropped into this directory…if it hasn’t been modified in 30 days, take the file and move it to a different storage area. So, instead of a file taking up space on primary high-speed disk, you’ll move it to SATA or a tape library, and ease the storage burden on the expensive primary storage. We manage the movement of that data to tiers of storage, but we keep it transparent to the applications and the users because we have that file system on the front end.

Here’s an example: you’re working on FCP and you drop a file into a folder that says "Project X," which is completed and delivered to the customer. Storage Manager will grab that big file and move it to cheaper disk. But FCP won’t know that we moved it. It will still look like it’s on a local hard drive. When you double-click, it will be returned from the SATA disk to the primary file system.

Do some production customers buy the system for archive use?

Many people do buy the file system only; others are looking for protection and/or archiving.  Having a file system front-end for a big archive adds simplicity to the environment, allowing applications and users access to the archive without using complex API calls

Can you tell us about any major developments on the horizon?

We do have some announcements about important new partnerships, which are releasing around NAB. We focus a lot on our partner activities not just on reselling, but on people and companies who see the value in it and either resell or reference-sell it. Blue Order is a media asset management company that has integrated StorNext with their applications. Another company called Marquis has also integrated with Storage Manager for AVId interoperability.

Quantum will be located at booth SL2509.