Omneon announced the launch of the MediaGrid active storage system, the first content storage system of its kind, designed specifically for the demands of working with large digital media files within broadcast and video production facilities. Combining Grid storage and Grid computing through the use of multiple intelligent, interconnected-yet-independent storage servers, the new system enhances the efficiency of digital media access for users and applications across the entire broadcast workflow. The MediaGrid system provides centralized shared storage that is scalable in capacity, bandwidth and media processing power.

The unique modular design of MediaGrid utilizes industry-standard components and connectivity to create a configurable, reliable and cost-effective system. Components of the system communicate over standard Ethernet and generate massive aggregate bandwidth that is available to external clients of the system, eliminating bottlenecks associated with traditional shared-storage environments. Each storage component is also a media processing engine, making computational resources available to applications for media processing functions while content resides within the storage system.

"MediaGrid is an incredibly elegant solution that takes many individual off-the-shelf industry standard components and makes them work together in a more intelligent manner, ultimately creating a system that is more affordable, more powerful and easier to use than other storage systems," said Geoff Stedman, vice president of marketing for Omneon. "No longer is storage just a passive repository of data -- we've made MediaGrid an active part of the workflow by utilizing the integrated processing power of each component to perform media processing functions on stored content."

Omneon MediaGrid enables television broadcasters and content providers to easily implement an all-digital, disk-based workflow and connect many disparate systems into a single shared-storage environment. The key to MediaGrid is its unique modular design that utilized industry-standard components and connectivity to create a configurable and reliable system.

The main components of a MediaGrid system are ContentDirectors and ContentServers. ContentDirectors act as the overall file system controllers, managing the distribution of data throughout the system and providing data maps to clients for retrieval of media from the system. ContentServers are the engines that actually store and provide access to media. ContentServers, available in 2TB "high-bandwidth" and 12TB "high-capacity" configurations, are individual storage servers that provide a combination of storage capacity, high-bandwidth network access and processing power. ContentServers act as smart nodes on an interconnected grid that require no assistance from the ContentDirectors to communicate with clients or one another. ContentServers are interconnected via redundant Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, and additional ContentServers can be added easily to the system at any time. This simple structure makes MediaGrid scalable, reliable and manageable. Storage capacities can start as small as a few terabytes and scale to more than a petabyte. Bandwidth starts at multiple gigabits per second and increases to many times that amount as additional ContentServers are added.

The MediaGrid architecture is based on a distributed file system designed to address the particular needs of managing large media files. MediaGrid uses a file segmentation scheme that employs file slices as the unit of storage, instead of the traditional blocks used by conventional data storage systems. Every file is divided into slices, which are then stored in multiple locations across the pool of ContentServers. Redundant ContentDirectors manage the distribution of slices and maintain the database of slice locations. A slice on the MediaGrid -- which has a nominal size of 8MB -- is stored and retrieved from the storage pool in an intelligent fashion, which ensures both integrity and performance of the system. Multiple replicas of each slice are created in the process and redistributed to other drives on other ContentServers based on an adjustable replication factor. This allows MediaGrid to provide greater resiliency and bandwidth for critical or high-demand content than for less-used, aged content.

In the event of failure of any drive or ContentServer, all slices of all files still reside in the system and can be accessed without interruption, even as the system automatically begins to make new copies of the slices. Lengthy RAID rebuilds are never necessary, and when a failed drive is replaced, there is never a need to initiate a volume rebuild.

Omneon announced broad support for MediaGrid by application developers who are endorsing this new system. The Omneon MediaGrid was designed for easy integration with workflow and content management systems through open file protocols and APIs. Additionally, since the MediaGrid allows applications to manage and process media files while the files remain in place on the MediaGrid, these applications become more active in the workflow, functioning in parallel with other activity, in contrast to the digital islands they once were.