Does it look like a Ancor switch application?
Renaissance Hotel, Washington, D.C.
Mar. 16, 1999 - Mar. 18, 1999
Presentation
SHOWTIME Networks Case Study
Dirk Van Dall, Principal Consultant, Digital Video, SHOWTIME
Session: Streaming SANs in Action 1
Ballroom West A and B, Renaissance Hotel
Tues., March 16, 1 p.m.
SHOWTIME Networks has implemented a storage area network
(SAN) enabled by Mercury Computer Systems' shared-SAN software.
SHOWTIME's shared SAN is the basis for the automated assembly
of interstitial clips for six broadcast television channels, soon to be
expanded to eight. The configuration consists of seven Macintosh.
systems connected through two Fibre Channel switches to a terabyte
of hardware RAID storage. The Macintosh workstations are located
throughout the facility and are tied to the Fibre Channel switches via
fiber-optic cable. This session will outline the original work-flow
model and reveal how the shared SAN was designed and
implemented. In addition, we will discuss how the shared SAN
enables an entirely new workflow for the production and airing of
promos, menus, and behind-the-scenes as well as the plans for future
expansion.
Presentation
Sharing Data on a SAN Now!
Chris Stakutis, Director of Eng., Shared Storage Business Unit
Session: Sharing Data in a SAN
Ballroom West A and B, Renaissance Hotel
Tues., March 16, 2 p.m.
Storage Area Networks (SANs) offer the promise of increased
efficiency and centralized control to enterprise computing
environments. The primary expectations of a SAN revolve around the
notion of exploiting a common storage-side communication
infrastructure. Often, the focus is on amortizing the cost of physical
storage systems across multiple servers, as opposed to sharing the
data of different systems. Why? Because sharing the data has been
perceived as an impossible task without the development of major
software promised years from now. Not so. There are, in fact,
approaches to solving the shared-data aspect of a SAN that are
viable now. Some approaches put forth by certain factions in the
storage industry would indeed take years to implement, as these
approaches are heavy on the recreation side and have overlooked
knitting SA N support into the well-used and well-accepted
architectures of modern computer operating systems. Certainly,
SANs without shared data are quite attractive to any enterprise
environment, but SANs w ith shared data capability can realize more
value-add in multiple ways. |
