Harnessing NVMe technology

Post-production studios are struggling to keep up with the rapid increase in both resolution and colour fidelity. The current normal is 4K-10bit, 4K-16bit is becoming commonplace, and 8K is just over the horizon. Open EXR, and ACES along with uncompressed clip-based workflows are now happening as well. This taxes existing disk-based systems beyond their capability, requiring a new approach to storage.

Sim, having successfully filled its show roster of work using such large file formats, quickly needed additional high-performance storage. Sim turned to MelroseINC as a partner to engineer a solution based on the newest technology of NVMe. 

“We were extremely impressed with the level of technology and speed that Excelero’s software with NVMe hardware has presented to Sim - offering us six times faster performance than our existing storage network,” said Paul Chapman, VP of Engineering and Technology/LA, at Sim.

New Software-Defined Architecture
Newer NVMe SSDs are increasingly the go-to solution when studios and their customers need streaming, editing, and finishing in high framerates. Excelero NVMesh software-defined storage solution enables workstation and server access to large scalable bandwidth and low latency performance to meet these needs. Its NVMesh provides a full scale out solution for 4K frame-based Colour and Finish workflows and beyond. Based on 4 independent servers, with 6 NVMe disks per node, native Linux based clients can expect 11GBps over 100Gb ethernet. Windows and Mac clients are able to achieve up to 2.5 Gbps over 25Gb Ethernet.

Benefits of Excelero with NVMe High Throughput and Low Latency Storage 

• Reduces infrastructure costs by 50% utilising 100 Gb Ethernet
• Unleash the performance of NVMe, which is 5-35x the performance of legacy SSD and HDD
• Minimise changes to workflows by combining with existing storage hardware to use NVMe as Tier 0
• Future-proof with any number of streams, any resolution, any frame rate