NAB 2004 Pick Hits

Jun 1, 2004 3:10 PM

1 Beyond | Harmony Shared SAN

Over the past few years, 1 Beyond gained a rep for high-performance desktops and laptops that priced competitively with more standard offerings. At the show, the Somerville, Mass.-based company debuted a number of new workstations and systems. Among all the gear, the 1 Beyond Harmony SAN made the most impressive debut. Claimed as the industry's first shared, uncompressed HD SAN and render farm for graphics and animation, the Harmony SAN also comes in at a system price that makes top technology accessible.

"I think the ability to have up to 32 concurrent users of 10-bit uncompressed HD is very important and very high-performance," says Bob Turner. "The ability to demonstrate it on the floor of NAB with 400ft. separating client and server was another important breakthrough that I saw no one else demonstrating. That is pretty powerful real-world stuff that is hard to fudge with smoke and mirrors."

April 28, 2004

1 Beyond Harmony

1 Beyond had one of its HD Pro workstations in the Adobe booth. What is remarkable about that is not that it was editing uncompressed 10-bit HD video and audio, but that it was doing so by accessing and controlling media on the 1 Beyond Harmony SAN at the opposite corner of the lower South exhibition hall. By following the long orange fiberoptic cable, I found their booth (as did many others -- neat marketing concept) and marveled at the Harmony - my next Making THE CUT Award selection.

The 1 Beyond Harmony Storage Area Network (SAN) supports from 2 to 32 editing. compositing and on-air systems accessing 10-bit uncompressed HD video with system prices starting at $35,000. Editing and compositing applications are from Adobe Systems applications-only, but you can also access other graphics and animation applications. With its simultaneous read and write capability, editors can begin editing as the images are still being ingested. These systems are already being used by major networks and large-scale users.

The product is scaleable for many types of users and can be used with standard definition and DV-based media as well as HD. The system can store hundreds of hours of uncompressed HD material and offer up to 13.5 GB/sec of aggregate throughput with FC connections at 2Gb/sec. The Harmony SAN can be tied into the 1 Beyond Redline Render Farm shared processing engines.