STA

Author: Alvin Ooi, Marketing Manager,
Advanced Industrial Computer

The fast-growing demands of media storage in the broadcasting industry pose a significant challenge to the industry's IT professionals. The entire workflow process, from intake and production to play-to-air, requires massive storage capacities which are easily and quickly accessible. Streamlining the process of retrieving and restoring media, while maintaining IT overhead, is a key issue for industry broadcast media professionals. Their challenge is to find a large capacity, scalable solution that is fast, reliable and cost-effective.

Figure 1: The KCET-TV computer Room

KCET-TV serves Southern and Central California. It is watched by four million viewers a month in 11 counties, the largest broadcast reach of any public television station in the United States. Throughout its more than 40-year history, KCET-TV has won awards for its public affairs programming, drama and documentary productions, family and children's programs, community services and local and regional news.

Author: Alvin Ooi, Marketing Manager
Xtore Extreme Storage
Advanced Industrial Computer

Introduction
While High Definition (HD) video contents are getting more and more popular in real video production, TV companies are experiencing the bottleneck of using legacy equipment to edit their HD video programs. One of the customers of PFU Systems (Panasonic, Fujitsu and Uchida), GCTV (Green City Cable TV), a local cable Nagoya TV Station in Japan, needed a cost-effective storage solution that provided high performance for editing multiple HD quality video. The traditional SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) Ultra320 SCSI-based storage system cannot work smoothly with a nonlinear video editing system. When GCTV used an Ultra320 SCSI RAID System to edit multiple HD video chips, they could only run three restricted HD video streams (draft quality) at the same time without frame skips. Since the HD video format is 1080i with a 145Mb/sec data rate, a Fibre Channel solution is able to resolve the performance bottleneck. However, it is very costly to acquire a FC solution. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is capable of providing equivalent performance at a lower price point.

Author: Kent Bransford, Senior Technical Editor,
Seagate Technology

The following is an actual case study, illustrating how SAS technology is a key enabler of high-performance business intelligence storage solutions that utilize the concept of a "server brick."

Microsoft Project REAL
The server brick concept was developed by Microsoft while working on Project REAL (Reference implementation, End-to-end, At scale, and Lots of users). The project involved a major US retailer with over 800 stores in the US and more than 40,000 employees. While the retailer's sales and data warehouse was initially 1.5TB in size, by the project's completion it had grown to over 4TB and was expected to continue this rapid expansion in the future.

Author: Stephen Weekley, Marcom Program Manager, Storage, Corporate Planning and Marketing, LSI Logic
With Tim Bolden, president of iGLASS Networks and Tomas Havrda, Managing Partner of Solid Access Technologies

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) user sees dramatic productivity improvement by adopting the newly developed solid state disk (SSD) device from Solid Access Technologies with its breakthrough IOP performance/cost metric. iGLASS Networks selected the Solid Access Universal Solid State Disk 200 (USSD 200) along with LSI's Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) solution to achieve a remarkably fast storage system.