At a party to launch MediaGrid, Omneon introduced what they described as an entirely new digital media storage platform which it is claimed will deliver the highest level of performance, scalability and reliability.
Geoff Stedman - VP Marketing |
Geoff Stedman – Vice President of Marketing who hosted the evening, provided an overview of the new products and introduced two guest speakers. “Media Grid is an incredibly elegant solution that takes many individual off-the-shelf industry standard components and makes them work together in a more intelligent manner, ultimately creating a system that is more affordable, more powerful, and easier to use than other storage systems. No longer is storage just a passive repository of data – we’ve made MediaGrid an active part of the workflow by utilizing the integrated processing power of each component to perform media processing functions on stored content”.
Grid computing is a well known concept of networked computers capable of distributing process execution across a parallel infrastructure sometimes called intelligent nodes. These Grids have been used to create virtual “Supercomputers” to process and resolve large computational problems.
In this case Omneon have combined both computing power and storage capacity by dividing media files in to “slices” and distributing them over multiple locations.
Development partners |
Two main components make up MediaGrid systems; ContentDirectors which manage the distribution of data and ContentServers which both store and process the data. Geoff Stedman explained that combining both the storage and processing removed the need to transport data between systems in which storage and processing are separate.
This new introduction by Omneon is described a platform for third party developers and solution providers who will either develop or port their applications to the system. As such Omneon are not providing the entire solution themselves but encouraging third parties to adopt the MediaGrid platform through published APIs.
More than 23 application developers were announced to be supporting the system including Blue Order, Front Porch Digital, Ibis, Omnibus Systems, Pharos Communication, Probel, Snell & Willcox and Sundance Digital.
John Honeycutt - Exec VP Discovery |
Two early adopters were introduced; Steve Fish – VP Engineering Turner Networks and John Honeycutt Exec VP Discovery.
Other new product introductions include ClipTool Pro for the monitoring, record and playout control of current Omneon Spectrum media servers and MirrorTool with an automated solution for copying ingested and edited media files from one server system to another.
