Storage Players 'Nab' Broadcasters

While enterprise storage pros converge at SNW in San Diego next week, a substantial group of their peers in the broadcasting and entertainment market will head to Las Vegas. There, most big storage players will also pitch their wares at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters, showcasing the importance of this vertical to storage networking.

For some, NAB is a more important storage show than SNW. "We focus most of our storage sales on this vertical," says Lisa Pistacchio, a spokesperson for SGI. At next week's show, SGI plans to reveal new broadcast customers clair Laboratoires and Premier Media Group.

The move to digital is creating unprecedented storage demand in the multibillion-dollar entertainment and broadcasting space. "This market is undergoing the most fundamental transformation since the introduction of TV," says Jay Wampold, senior director of marketing at Isilon.

"It's been a real evolution, going from tape to digital, and from two channels to four and now to six channels, 24 hours a day, seven days a week," said Michael Day, chief engineer at SGI customer Premier Media Group, Australia. His group recently installed a 33-Tbyte SAN to accommodate needed growth.

Another customer, who purchased an ATTO solution, describes a similar digital migration. "High Definition uncompressed non-linear editing requires large amounts of storage. Each second takes about 160 Mbytes at 10-bit uncompressed. That expands to about 10 GBytes per minutes and 600 Gbytes per hour," says jeff Dockendorff, associate director of engineering with Channel Thirteen/WNET of New York in a prepared statement.