How To-Guide details creation of simple SANs for digital and real-time broadcasting

In the new implementation guide, DataDirect discusses how to build appliance-based SANs, covering topics including storage consolidation, architecting flexible, scalable network topologies, and automating information management. Designed for the IT professional tasked with solving day-to-day challenges in broadcasting and digital media, the white paper answers the questions - why and how - involved in building storage area networks.

Digital Broadcast: Around the Clock, Live to Air is the latest in DataDirect Networks' family of white papers that include implementation guides, network briefs, and broadcast solution briefs.

DataDirect Networks has created highly scalable, simple-to-deploy and easy-to-manage Silicon Storage Appliances to accelerate application performance, simplify information management, and lower operating costs. Using a Silicon Storage Appliance-based infrastructure to create the storage area network allows broadcasting professionals to overcome the many limitations of first generation storage networks, with the plug and play appliance bringing application productivity through acceleration, cost-effective scalability and simplicity with high QoS.

DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows creative professionals to increase their application's productivity, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) solutions and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology. The acceleration of data to applications and users, simply and easily, allows DataDirect Networks' customers to consolidate their storage; the Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows management of up to 100 Terabytes by a single system administrator, providing 10x lower Total Cost of Ownership.

Silicon Storage Appliances bring parallelism and superior virtualisation benefits to content creators and provides unmatched advantages to the production environment. For broadcasters and creative professionals needing high stream count, rock solid audio and video streams, storage and host scalability, and simplified management, DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology sets new standards in application acceleration and plug and play simplicity.

DataDirect's enterprise-class S2A 6000 Silicon Storage Appliance directly supports up to 512 workstations and 180 Terabytes of storage, simultaneously supporting a multitude of ingest, NLE, CG, playout and browse stations. With each appliance's ability to supply over 6000 hours of 50Mbit/sec MPEG2@ML content to 90 concurrent streams, the Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to broadcasting and production environments. DataDirect's "format independence" guarantees scaling of capacity and streams from highly-compressed all the way to HD and beyond.

The S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance, based on DataDirect's proven S2A 6000 appliance technology, brings a simple to deploy, easy to manage and affordable storage network appliance that allows departments and workgroups to achieve application performance gains, cost-effective scalability and simplified management. Each S2A 3000 Silicon Storage Appliance supplies an aggregate bandwidth up to 400 megabytes per second to Linux, Unix, Windows NT/2000, Sun, AIX, HP-UX and SGI workgroups. The S2A 3000 can easily manage storage network environments ranging in capacity from 500GB to 7 Terabytes.

Customers using DataDirect's Silicon Storage Appliances include the E! Networks, Time Warner Cable, RTL Television, British Broadcasting Company, CineGroupe, Star TV, Loudeye, NASA, NCSA, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, National Century Financial Enterprises, Sandia National Laboratories, and Sonic Foundry, among others. DataDirect SAN partnerships include VERITAS Software, Seagate, Emulex, and QLogic, among others.