Avid Unveils Nearline Storage Solution

Avid today introduced Avid NEXIS | E5 NL nearline storage solution. With the addition of this high-density on premises solution to the Avid NEXIS family — the world’s first software-defined storage platform for media — Avid customers “can seamlessly and efficiently manage media across all of their online, nearline, and archive storage resources,” the company said. Unveiled today at the fifth annual Avid Connect, Avid NEXIS E5 NL will be demonstrated at the NAB Show in Avid’s booth SU801, April 9-12.

Avid NEXIS | E5 NL is tightly integrated into Avid media applications, services and workflows, and includes a new web-based Avid NEXIS management console app for managing, controlling and monitoring Avid | NEXIS installations. Avid NEXIS l E5 NL can be easily accessed through MediaCentral | Cloud UX or Media Composer and also integrates with MediaCentral | Production Management, MediaCentral | Asset Management, and MediaCentral | Editorial Management to drive collaboration, including project and bin sharing. Extending the Avid NEXIS | FS (file system) to a secondary storage tier eliminates the need for third-party tools to search for, find and import media from multiple pools of third-party storage, enabling users to locate content distributed throughout their operations more quickly and efficiently.  

“Managing multiple storage systems from multiple vendors is costly, time-consuming, and results in slow, unreliable and inefficient workflows,” said Dana Ruzicka, chief product officer at Avid. “With the addition of Avid NEXIS | E5 NL, Avid NEXIS offers customers a comprehensive range of media-optimized storage solutions, from nearline to very high-performance all flash SSD storage, all under one storage architecture and one file system, all with the hallmark scalability, redundancy, and reliability of Avid NEXIS.”

Suited for project parking, staging workflows and proxy archive, Avid NEXIS | E5 NL streamlines the workflow between active and non-active assets, allowing media organizations to park assets and completed projects on high-density nearline storage, and keep them within easy reach for rediscovery and reuse. Up to eight Avid NEXIS | E5 NL engines can be integrated as one virtualizable pool of storage, making it easy for teams to find and access parked assets and projects. In addition, other Avid NEXIS Enterprise engines can be integrated into a single storage pool and the storage can be partitioned for better archival organization.

Additional Avid NEXIS | E5 NL features include:

• The ability to configure, control and monitor Avid NEXIS using the updated management console aligned with MediaCentral | Cloud UX.  Its dashboard provides an overview of the system’s performance, bandwidth, and status, as well as access to quickly configure and manage workspaces, storage groups, user access, notifications, and other functions. The flexibility and security of HTML5 enables mobile device support, allowing users to monitor and configure their system while on the go.

• Scalability from 480 TB of storage to more than 7 PB by connecting multiple Avid NEXIS | E5 NL engines together as a single nearline system for a highly-scalable, lower-cost secondary tier of storage.

• A flexible storage infrastructure which can be provisioned with required capacity and fault-tolerance characteristics.

Avid NEXIS | E5 NL will be available in May.