Looking to get content to-air faster?  Need to share content more efficiently and cost effectively?  StorNext has you covered.  From ingest to editing to playout, Quantum’s StorNext is designed to consolidate storage and enable data sharing across application suites so that you can create cutting edge broadcasts faster and eliminate time consuming, often linear, content transfers between creative staff.

The Powered By StorNext Advantage:

Where does StorNext fit into your workflow? 
Where ever you store content that needs to be shared and anywhere you want to take advantage of digital archiving to reduce costs while keeping content accessible. In a typical broadcast workflow, StorNext is not designed to alter operations so much as enhance them.  As shown in Figure 1, StorNext serves as a hub for content storage.  Acquisition, ingest, editing, and playout occur as usual but using consolidated storage.  And because StorNext is based on an open-systems architecture, hardware and applications can be from practically any vendor, giving you the freedom of choice to build a workflow based on your specific needs.

Acquisition and Ingest: Gather feeds from whatever source you need, whether its live, camera, disc, or tape.  Data is sent to ingest servers as usual for digitization, encoding, and annotation.  Content is then written to a StorNext shared storage pool instead of dropping data into a direct attached storage device or being written to tape, both of which make content sharing difficult.  Each ingest server has direct access to the shared storage via a number of possible methods:

• Fibre Channel for high speed, low latency access when ingest must occur as fast as possible
• iSCSI for lower speed, cost efficient access
• StorNext LAN Client for fast, highly resilient access using clustered gateways (not pictured)

Multiple encodings of data can be written by ingest servers in parallel to the shared storage so that low-res and hi-res copies are available for production.  Once content is stored in file-format it is available for use across the entire workflow without the need to write back to or ingest from tape, enabling an “ingest once, use many” workflow.

Production Editing and Building the Rundown:  Even as data is being written into a StorNext shared storage pool, it is immediately available to your entire creative staff – in parallel.  StorNext lets all your creative staff and broadcast engineers quickly browse for relevant clips or perform proxy editing to build a ready-to-play segment.  Content is accessed from the central storage pool without the need for cumbersome exchanges between editing servers.  NRCS or ENPS systems fold into the solution seamlessly so journalists can share the same content for tasks from logging to storyboarding and addition of voice-overs.
If additional editing is necessary craft editors, graphics stations and audio specialists all have access to the shared storage for creating a finished product with necessary captions, titles, and overlays.  Since data never has to be written out to tape during the editing process the time needed to create a program is drastically reduced and equipment costs like tape stock and VTR replacement heads are significantly reduced. 

Play-To-Air:    When its time to broadcast pre-built programs or last-minute updates, video servers will have rapid access to content.  Using either direct connections to StorNext shared storage or a migration policy in which content is transferred to storage on the media servers, content is accessible much faster than pulling it back from tape and without the possible quality impacts that could occur during re-ingest.  NRCS systems, via MOS gateway connections, control play-to-air as usual.  Since centralized content is available to all systems, networks can easily transcoded programs for playout across other venues like the Internet.

Digital Archiving:  In addition to your production workflow operations, StorNext also performs archiving.  Using an additional server that attaches to the shared storage pool, StorNext can automatically archive any or all content that is not actively in use to a broad array of storage devices for cost effective retention and data protection.  This includes:

• Off-the-shelf SATA Disk for high speed, nearline archiving
• Disk with De-Duplication for content optimized archiving
• Tape for low cost, portable onsite or offsite, cold archiving

Data movement is transparent so that applications and operators do not have to worry about where data is located.  Whether on primary disk, secondary disk, or tape content looks like its in the same location.  This lets you create a huge, searchable repository of content for future re-use in promos, retrospectives, and other broadcast operations.  And with integrity checks and file cloning for data protection, you can be sure your content is safeguarded for long term re-purposing.