M+E Connections

NEW YORK — Several members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) showcased their latest products and services at NAB Show New York Oct. 18-19 at Jacob Javits Convention Center.

G-Technology
Western Digital’s G-Technology division used the show to spotlight the G-DRIVE mobile SSD R-Series portable solid-state drive (SSD) that it announced in September, but is just starting to ship now. The company is touting the device as its fastest portable SSD.

The device is part of a new “ruggedized” line of SSDs with an International Protection Rating of 67 (IP67), Mathew Bennion, senior product marketing manager, told us Oct. 18 at the show. That means “it can handle a three-meter drop onto carpeted floor” made of concrete and will “withstand a thousand pounds of pressure,” making it crush-resistant, he said. Although the device’s shell may crack at 1,000 pounds, the SSD inside will be fine because it’s been “encapsulated in an aluminum heat sink,” he said.

The device was designed for today’s “larger and more powerful cameras” that “breed larger file sizes” and created a “need for equally large and powerful storage solutions,” according to the company. With the mobile SSD R-Series, not only does the user get up to 2TB of capacity, but also “peace of mind knowing that these drives will stand up to … unpredictable and inclement conditions,” it said in announcing the product Sept. 14. The drive offers transfer speeds up to 560MB a second, according to G-Technology. That means it will “enable editors to quickly save and edit large video, photo and audio files in real time with speeds fast enough to keep up with your content,” the company said.

Although rival products “will have a really great number at the beginning,” they don’t typically maintain a fast transfer speed like 560MB, Bennion told us. “Over minutes of running, that number comes down dramatically because they’re throttling the write speed” on competing products, he said, adding: “It’s that sustained performance that makes this truly different from the competitors.” That’s important because “in the video world,” when there is a slowdown in transfer speed, issues including frames being dropped are a concern, he said.

G-Technology is offering a five-year limited warranty for the new drive, Bennion said, noting that’s not something rivals typically offer with similar drives. The SSD was to cost $699.95 for a 2-TB SKU, $379.95 for 1TB and $199.95 for 500GB, according to the company’s September press release. But Bennion said the 1TB model is shipping at $30 lower than the price cited earlier, while the 500GB SKU is shipping at $20 lower than the price cited earlier. A device just like the 2TB model from G-Technology’s “arch nemesis” in the space costs about $100 more, he added.

Although a prototype of the new SSD was shown at IBC in Amsterdam in September, the finalized product wasn’t shown publicly for the first time until NAB Show New York, he said, adding we’ll be seeing “a lot more SSD” from G-Technology in the future.

Qumulo
The Seattle-based file storage company spotlighted its new Qumulo File Fabric (QF2) offering at the show. QF2, announced by the company last month, was made available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), bringing universal-scale file storage to the cloud. QF2 delivers higher performance and capacity for file-based data on the cloud and on premises, while providing real-time visibility and control of the data footprint. Qumulo offers a free tier for using QF2 on AWS up to 5TB, giving businesses the freedom to store, manage and share file-based data across on-premises data centers and the cloud.

Calling QF2 a “modern, highly scalable file storage system that runs in the on-premise data center and in the public cloud,” Jay Wampold, Qumulo VP of marketing, told MESA Oct. 16 that the offering “has been a long time coming for us.” In addition to launching on AWS, the company also “launched continuous replication, which enables companies to move data wherever it needs to be — whether that’s in the data center, in the cloud or geographically distributed,” he said. Also launched was a trend service that he said, “enables storage administrators to be able to manage the entire fleet of storage, regardless of where it is as well.”

Qumulo also announced that visual effects studio FuseFX started using QF2 on AWS. “The use case for them is one that we are seeing quite a bit of, which is the ability to replicate data from their on-premise data center into the public cloud to do a rendering job and to be able to perform the high-computation rendering and then to replicate the artifact of that rendering job back to their on-premise data center,” Wampold said. He added: “Like many customers,” FuseFX wants to “take advantage of the high parallel compute that AWS offers.”

Qumulo’s customers now include “four out of the five major animation studios,” he also told us, adding customer adoption of Qumulo in the media and entertainment industry has “grown pretty dramatically over the last 12 months or so.”

It’s the first time that Qumulo has exhibited at NAB Show New York, which he said, “presents an opportunity to see East Coast media, especially in New York, who don’t typically attend” the annual NAB Show in Las Vegas. While Qumulo has “a pretty big concentration of media companies out of the West Coast” that are customers, including in Los Angeles, and also post production houses in Canada, he told us: “We’re in the process of really growing our business in New York. So, I think it’s a great opportunity for us to showcase what we’re doing.”

Qumulo’s product has also “really matured quite a bit in the last year and we’re in a much sort of stronger position for a lot more use cases than we were even a year ago,” he told us. “So, I really expect this to be a great show. It’s obviously not the size and scale of NAB [Las Vegas], but it is really important for what we’re up to,” he said, adding: “The media and entertainment industry is sort of the fastest-growing space for Qumulo. We have dedicated a lot of investment, enabling a broad range of use cases and this is sort of the beginning for us. We came out of stealth mode a little over two years ago and the product has matured a lot and we’re definitely starting to get real traction in the industry.”

Verizon Digital Media Services
Verizon Digital Media Services touted how its Volicon Media Intelligence service can help organizations get to over-the-top (OTT) faster and easier within their existing workflows, it said. The company demonstrated the latest advancements to the Volicon service, including a new Deliver application, powered by Verizon’s Uplynk Video Streaming service. That integration “allows users to launch linear channels for OTT or TV Everywhere quickly and economically,” the company said in a prepared statement, adding that customers can now have “industry-leading compliance, monitoring and OTT origination in a single footprint within your facility.”

The company also used NAB Show New York to tout: enhanced content clipping capabilities to produce more content for VOD, websites and social media; compliance logging of Ultra High-Definition content; video analytics (MOS, blockiness, blurriness, fuzziness); and path monitoring (a single solution for OTT, linear and MCR monitoring), it said.