Avid Unity ISIS
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Shunning the centralized intelligence of SANs, the Avid Unity ISIS (Infinitely Scalable Intelligent Storage) is based on a distributed intelligence scheme. The distributed intelligence design greatly increases the redundancy, and in turn, the reliability, of the Unity ISIS over a SAN. Distributed intelligence also makes the design infinitely scalable, meaning that there are no built-in limitations on storage or connectivity.
The Unity ISIS comes in 8TB blocks, or engines. An 8TB engine consists of 16 blades, each made up of two drives. Every blade carries intelligence about the contents and health status of the other blades. If any blade fails, the others will instantly know about the failure and relocate the data that was previously stored on that blade. This repair will take place behind the scenes – user access to the storage will not be affected while during the repair.
The Unity ISIS currently ranges in size between 8TB and 64TB, but Avid is currently preparing to move beyond that limit, as they are not bound by the bottleneck of centralized intelligence. The larger the size of the storage, the greater will be its bandwidth.
Users can add one or more 8TB chasses without shutting down the system. The old drives will then redistribute the stored information between themselves and the new drives. This redistribution can take place even while users are accessing the system. As many as 100 dual stream 50Mbps users can simultaneously work on the Unity ISIS network and the system can currently handle 1,000 user accounts. Future upgrades will increase these numbers. The system’s Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure can handle projects that require up to 145Mbps, making it more than sufficient for SD video and fully capable of handling HDV, DVCPRO HD, and Avid’s DNxHD.
The Unity ISIS is fully compatible with Avid’s other Unity systems. In early 2006, it will be available for Windows. The Mac version will be released a few months later. Prices start at $107,000.
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