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MillimeterBeta sight: AMCC 3ware Sidecar
Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM,
By Michael Lewis
Photo News Media
RAID storage system ideal for road warriors.
When Photo News Media founder Michael Lewis (pictured above) needed a RAID storage solution for rugged, on-location news broadcasting, he turned to the 3ware Sidecar from AMCC.
It was just another typical day for our news-content company. Hurricane Dean had made landfall as a Category 5 storm in Mexico's Costa Maya region. Dean was the first hurricane to make landfall in the Atlantic basin at Category-5 intensity in 15 years, and we were right in the middle of it. We were the only news crew other than NBC and some of their affiliates to make it that far south to report on the story. While the hurricane raged on, we fed video footage to a dozen networks, both international and across the United States.
My company specializes in delivering content from hard-to-reach locations from around the world. Whether we're providing coverage in a combat zone to major news networks or we're in the middle of a hurricane, it's critical for us to be there first and broadcast from where the news is happening. Of course, our equipment is designed to make this a reality. Our hurricane news truck is a rugged Hummer H1 that has the ability to run on bio-diesel. Our weatherproof, bonded Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN)-based equipment shoots through heavy cloud cover with a streaming data rate of 512kbps and the compression technology to pump our video feed anywhere live.
So whether we're enduring 100mph winds or bullets whizzing by, the last thing I want to think about is my storage.
What could be interesting about the 9,541 videotapes that cram-pack my office storage room? Do I worry about the Florida salt air corroding them? Yes. Could I find some old footage if necessary? Possibly, but that's only because we have them barcoded. Business got a lot more interesting last November when we went completely tapeless.
Like most digital-video crews, we're finding that we're much more generous with our shooting. We'll take 30 minutes of footage and want to save the 40GB to 50GB of uncompressed video, cuts, edits, and all. We use a variety of cameras — our tapeless cameras being the Panasonic AJ-HPX2000 and AG-HVX200 and Sony PMW-EX1 XDCAM. With some of our cameras holding as many as five 32GB cards, data capacity quickly became a problem. Dumping this data onto inexpensive hard-disk drives worked well, except another problem arose in the editing process: the performance in accessing and running the data from the drives. It sounded to us like a recipe for RAID.
Many professionals in the AV business, such as postproduction houses, are already using redundant array of inexpensive (or independent) disks (RAID) to provide data performance and redundancy protection. Simply put, by striping data across a number of disk drives, data is more highly protected from drive failure. The RAID storage system we sought out needed to be large enough to handle our ever-growing data requirements. Being a Mac shop, we wanted a truly Mac-dedicated product that would integrate easily into our production workflow and support both our Florida and California locations.
