SCIENCE

GB Labs will be launching Space SSD at IBC 2011 (Hall 7 JI5B) – the first SSD (solid state drive) networked storage for video editing. Part of GB Labs’ Space family, Space SSD offers broadcasters and post production companies SSD storage that is more than 30 times faster than traditional spinning disk storage.

Space SSD will be the only shared storage system that allows online editing of 2K and 4K DPX files in a shared environment. A key benefit is speed, delivering over 3000MB/sec which manages the equivalent of 9 streams of 2K DPX, 900 streams of HDV, 146 streams of Pro-Res 4.2.2 or 30 streams of uncompressed HD.

In conjunction with Space SSD, GB Labs’ new Space file transfer software allows users to easily and quickly move data to larger, cost-effective storage such as Space 48TB. The key benefit of SSD technology is to provide fast IOPs (Input/Output Operations Per Second) to simultaneously read and write operations without degrading performance.

Dominic Harland, director, GB Labs said: “We understand that broadcasters aren’t likely to go completely SSD but some editing tasks do require high performance storage that spinning disks can’t match. We’ve provided a complimentary set of products which efficiently use high performance SDDs and larger capacity, lower cost storage. It allows editors to move large quantities of data efficiently between their storage without worry.”

He added: “We’ve designed Space SSD to offer a very high performance shareable work area that can be used to deal with demanding codecs at high speed such as 2k and 4k and 3D / HD content. Broadcasters often find it hard to get the performance they require using RAID units. Our testing shows it blows spinning disks out of the water in terms of performance.”  

GB Labs’ Space product range was created to satisfy the needs of the storage-hungry, performance-critical video-editing industry. Since their launch at IBC 2009, Space modules have been used all over the world, including at the FIA GT1 World Championship and by Thomson Reuters at the 2010 Football World Cup in South Africa.

The Space range is designed to handle storage for businesses of all sizes. The range goes from the highly portable Mini Space in 4TB and 8TB capacities, to the scalable enterprise-class Space in building blocks of 16TB, 32TB and 48TB.