Avid Dramatically Expands Media Storage Capacity and Performance with Avid NEXIS

BURLINGTON, MA, 2016/11/29

New Avid NEXIS solutions that boost performance and reliability are now available, enabling large-scale broadcast and post-production organizations to accelerate production and increase efficiency

Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) today announced new innovations for Avid NEXIS™, the industry’s first and only software-defined storage platform specifically designed for storing and managing media, are now available. Powered by the MediaCentral^® Platform, the industry’s most open, tightly integrated and efficient platform designed for media, Avid NEXIS High Availability options and dramatically enhanced scalability for Avid NEXIS | Enterprise systems provide unrivaled reliability, performance and storage capacity for the most demanding large-scale broadcast and post-production environments.

As part of Avid’s commitment to offering the most comprehensive tools and workflow solutions to create, distribute and optimize media, Avid NEXIS scalability enhancements now double the capacity of Avid NEXIS | Enterprise systems. Avid NEXIS supports up to 48 Media Packs across a single scale-out enterprise-class system, enabling customers to mix and match a combination of NEXIS | E5, E4, and E2 engines, whether for new installations or integrated with their existing Avid ISIS systems. With this new release, customers can scale the NEXIS system’s total capacity up to nearly 3 PB of total storage with up to 19.2 GB/seconds of bandwidth, capable of delivering 250 streams of Sony XAVC-Intra 59p UHD or more than 680 streams of DNxHD-220 media. 

The new scale out features build upon the previously announced Avid NEXIS High Availability options—including the Avid NEXIS Redundant Storage Controller, Redundant System Director, and Redundant Networking—protect mission-critical productions against potential hardware performance issues. Avid NEXIS Media Mirror Protection protects an entire Avid NEXIS system against any five simultaneous disk failures, and even an entire engine failure.

“Media organizations need more robust storage infrastructure, greater reliability and control, and closer collaboration in order to create high-quality and engaging content,” said Alan Hoff, vice president, Market Solutions, Avid. “These new innovations for Avid NEXIS deliver the most resilient storage system in the industry with unmatched scalability, together with high-availability options that address these needs and boost operational efficiency.”

Thanks to the openness of MediaCentral, Avid NEXIS solutions work with all top media creation applications, including Media Composer®, Pro Tools®, Apple Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Grass Valley EDIUS, and many more. Production teams can quickly access a shared pool of virtualized storage resources, which dramatically increases their efficiency—a testament to the media-savvy collaboration capabilities NEXIS delivers.

“Our clients primarily use Avid editing solutions, but we need the versatility to offer alternative workflows,” said Ollie Stratton, technical consultant and head of Video Europe’s edit department. “The fact [that] NEXIS has the ability to natively support Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Black Magic’s DaVinci Resolve, is a real leap forward for flexible, open workflows.”

Avid NEXIS enables dynamic virtualization so media organizations can adjust storage capacity mid-project, without disrupting workflows. Customers can select components that meet their current needs, and easily grow as their needs change.

Avid NEXIS is the only scale-out storage solution with adaptive protection, enabling customers to dynamically tune the system  to ensure that high-priority workflows always have the capacity, performance and data protection levels they require. Customers can give critical projects maximum performance, while throttling back on less critical workflows. This ability lets teams react quickly to changes, adjusting performance and protection levels to match the needs of a project at any stage in the workflow.

As part of Avid’s commitment to offering flexible deployment models, Avid offers a range of Avid NEXIS | Enterprise systems, including the hyper-dense Avid NEXIS | E5 storage engine, the Avid NEXIS | E4 high-density storage engine and the Avid NEXIS | E2 small-footprint storage engine.

Avid NEXIS enhanced scalability and the following Avid NEXIS High Availability options are now available:

• Avid NEXIS Redundant Storage Controller
• Avid NEXIS Redundant System Director
• Avid NEXIS Redundant Networking
• Avid NEXIS Media Mirroring