My NAB Report

NAB (National American Broadcaster) Show was, once again, a gigantic expo with around 100,000 attendees representing 160+ countries and 1600+ exhibitors.

As said in the past, Media and Entertainment is a large market segment for the storage industry. More and more greedy in capacity, now in-cloud media processing and operations, distribution and live streaming, networks bandwidth, complex media workflow, sophisticated editing and image/video processing, frequent movie production plus recent development in VR, drones and even IoT applications, all these illustrate the key role of storage in that industry.

Following 2018, Oracle and HPE have seriously decided to have a serious presence demonstrating solutions, I let you check the photos below.

On the other hand, Cisco, IBM and Dell had decent booths promoting intelligent comprehensive workflows respectively with IBM Spectrum Scale and Dell EMC Isilon. IBM has insisted a lot on solutions around Watson and Aspera. We also anticipate some news soon about IBM Cloud Object Storage.

We navigated in AWS, Google and Microsoft booths, growing their footprint every year with in-cloud media management and processing. We met Ron Bianchini, former CEO and founder of Avere Systems, at the show confirming the perfect fit of its NAS accelerator in such projects. Don't forget that Pixar is an Avere customer for many years now, swapping their back-end filers almost for every movie in production but keeping their first-tier Avere NAS. Other cloud storage vendors were there like Backblaze for B2 and Wasabi announcing their Media Innovation Cloud Alliance. We met Acembly on Wasabi booth speaking about a interesting cloud data management approach.

The event confirms the file storage adoption with different technologies, essentially divided in two categories:

• The classic NAS approach with NetApp, Pure Storage, Qumulo and MediaKind. The latter is the spin-off from Ericsson Media business Unit illustrating the return of Fabrix Systems under the name Video Storage and Processing Platform,
• and the SAN file sharing heritage what we call today asymmetric [parallel for some of them] distributed file system with the need to install a piece of software (agent, driver…) on clients as the file system exist between consumer i.e clients and producers i.e servers. It’s the case for Acelstor with MooseFS, Avid with Nexis, DDN, Dynamic Drive Pool aka DDP, EditShare, Facilis with HUB, Harmonic with MediaGrid, ScaleLogic, Quantum with StorNext, Quobyte, Rohde & Schwarz with SpycerNode based on IBM Spectrum Scale or Tiger Technology.

Secondary storage was also present in different flavors, tape vendors like Spectra Logic, Qualstar, we even visited the LTO consortium booth, data management specialists such Komprise, Atempo, StorageDNA or XenData, secondary disk solutions like Disk Archive, Nexsan, StorByte or Seagate promoting TapeArk solutions and many server vendors and object vendors like Caringo, Cloudian, DDN, Masstech, Object Matrix, Pure Storage or WDC but now also Qumulo with the Minio announcement.

We noticed the presence of Atempo with its new visual identity promoting Miria and its data migration service already adopted by Huawei, DDN and more recently Qumulo. Mellanox was also there with a small booth showing their Ethernet Media Fabric model.

Among the tons of announcements, we made our selection:

• Avid Nexis | Cloudspaces: extension for Nexis to park media on Azure cloud,
• Facilis: new platform named HUB replacing TerraBlock still with the famous recognized file system and cloud object storage with Wasabi and Azure with XenData integration,
• Quantum: new F-Series - FS2000 - 2U 24 dual-ported NVMe SSD storage array,
• Qumulo: new denser and faster C-72T appliance, Cross-Protocol Permissions and S3 based on Minio,
• and Western Digital with new G-Technology portable drive.

Once again this is one of the top 3 storage events organized every year with SuperComputing and I let you select the third...