ISIS 5500

Avid® (NASDAQ: AVID) today introduced the new Avid ISIS® 5500 online shared storage system, offering unprecedented value for small- to mid-sized post production, broadcast, education, and corporate facilities. The next-generation ISIS 5500 represents the continuing innovation of the company’s industry standard storage systems. It provides critical new capabilities to help small- and mid-sized media organizations more easily and efficiently deliver higher quality, inspiring content – by streamlining and accelerating editorial workflows.

“Media organizations of all sizes are facing relentless pressure to increase content production while simultaneously improving operational efficiency and controlling costs,” said Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of Products and Services at Avid. “With double the storage capacity and a host of new software features, ISIS 5500 brings both critical capabilities and breakthrough value to small- and mid-sized facilities.”

ISIS 5500, the successor to ISIS 5000, provides exceptional scalability; performance; media access, sharing, and protection; and real-time collaboration. The new 64 terabyte (TB) engine doubles storage capacity at the same price point as the ISIS 5000 32 TB system, delivering the value that media organizations urgently require. Further, Avid will continue to offer a 32 TB system at a 25 percent reduced rate. Specific features and benefits include:

• Exceptional scalability – A new 64 TB capacity that complements the existing 16 and 32 TB engines provides efficient, linear bandwidth scaling to sustain performance, making it easy to scale workgroups, bandwidth, and capacity. Media organizations can connect up to 90 content contributors at the same time, and scale workspaces and storage from 16 TB to 384 TB of raw storage, with up to six ISIS Engines and 1.8 GB per second of bandwidth.   

• New ISIS 4.5 software– Also available to existing ISIS 7000, 5000, and 2000 customers via a simple software upgrade, ISIS 4.5 software provides:
  • Real-time access, editing, and sharing ISIS-stored media using Red Hat Linux 6.2-compatible applications
  • Connectivity to ISIS online and nearline storage using Windows 8 clients

• Increased file count, with up to eight million files for ISIS 5500
• Enhanced File Gateway service to share all workspaces
• ISIS 2000 scalability - to five engines for up to 1.2 PB of nearline storage
• Failover protection with support for dual System Directors in ISIS 2000

• Real-time collaboration – Allows media organizations to connect their creative professionals in distributed and complex workflow environments, enabling contributors throughout the facility—or around the world using Interplay Sphere—to work together using the same media assets.

• Tight integration and more open workflow – Provides maximum production efficiency and flexibility with tight integration with the AirSpeed® ingest and playout server, Avid Interplay® asset management, and Avid editing workflows. With support for many third-party applications, including Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere, users can easily integrate ISIS 5500 into existing infrastructures.

• Reliable performance – Delivers the same simultaneous media access, dynamic storage allocation, and reliable linear scaling as ISIS 7000, while intuitive, web-based system management tools provide an easy, reliable way to store assets, accelerate editorial, and scale capacity, access, and bandwidth.

• Support for HD and high-res files – Enables media organizations to house a vast amount of SD, HD, and other high-res content from a variety of sources and make it readily available everywhere.

• Interoperability – ISIS 5500 family of products use the industry proven ISIS file system and is backward compatible with existing ISIS systems. ISIS 5500 engines can be added to existing ISIS 5000 storage systems providing investment protection.

Availability and Pricing

ISIS 5500 will be available worldwide in September 2013 with pricing starting at $27,000 USD.

ISIS 4.5 software will be available on September 17, 2013.  Customers with an Avid Advantage ExpertPlus or Elite support plan can upgrade to ISIS 4.5 anytime by logging in to their Avid Master Account.