Media & Entertainment

SAN & 3rd Party File System Integration

Infortrend’s SAN storage solution for media and entertainment industries provides several advantages.

Apple Xsan/StorNext is a SAN (storage area network) or a clustered file system made for macOS, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. This file system allows multiple clients to share block storages via a high-speed Fibre channel or iSCSI network. With the Xsan/StorNext file system, multiple workstations can read and write to the same storage simultaneously, allowing enterprises to fully utilize the shared disk file system, which includes the support for large file transfers, multiple mounted file systems, and multiple operating systems.

Apple Xsan

The M&E industry often adopts Apple’s Mac servers for production. In this case, M&E users often choose the Apple Xsan file system to share the SAN storage space as well. Infortrend’s pure SAN storage — EonStor DS family — is the ideal choice for this scenario.

EonStor DS family provides high performance without compromising stability. To deliver high and stable performance, which is a critical criteria for M&E users, the system supports high resolution videos without any frame drop during production.

One DS 3024 + 24 NL-SAS HDDs can support 120+ layers of 1080P video playback with 8 clients.

Besides high performance, EonStor DS family also provides excellent scalability. Even an entry-level model from EonStor DS family can be expanded with up to 448 drives, which we believe is relatively huge in the storage industry.

The following figure demonstrates the architecture example of EonStor DS with Apple Xsan. Users can run Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro on their workstation and access the space shared by Apple Xsan.

StorNext

EonStor GS families provide SAN storages that support StorNext, fine-tuned with Infortrend’s high-quality system configuration and on-site experience support. With a dual controller active/active hardware design, you can configure StorNext to get a more stable and balanced performance for a reachable and exceptional throughput of high resolution videos based on various benchmark tools, such as AJA, FrameTest, Blackmagic, among others. EonStor GS family is an enterprise unified storage solution that fully supports multi-client media and entertainment-related tasks in a StorNext environment.

Related Resource

• Best Practice: Infortrend and Apple Xsan Best Practice