SCIENCE

Harris Corporation announced it is adding product introductions to its Nexio video server portfolio, designed to help broadcasters accelerate time-to-air, reduce costs and treamline workflows in both playout and production environments.

According to Harris, the first addition to the Nexio video server line is the Nexio Volt, a small form-factor, high-performance baseband video server equipped with 2 TB of RAID 3-protected integrated media storage. Offering support for up to four mixed SD/HD or SD-only baseband channels in a 1RU package, the high-density Nexio Volt integrates into environments where space is at a premium.

Nexio Volt is ideal for applications including disaster recovery, edge server, on-air cache, production playout and ingest-to-archive. Built on the same technology as the Nexio AMP server, Nexio Volt offers software-enabled license keying that allows customers to pay for only the channels and resolutions they need, and upgrade to more channels or HD at anytime.

Harris introduced Nexio Farad, an online storage system ideal for large-scale ingest, editing and playout for production, sports, news and live-event applications. Customers in production environments face escalating storage and bandwidth requirements due to higher data rate codecs, more channels, more concurrent editing seats, additional camera feeds, 3 Gb/s and the overall volume of content. To address these challenges, Nexio Farad delivers the highest levels of bandwidth and storage capacity to support even the most demanding multiplatform media delivery workflows.

Nexio Farad is designed for customers requiring more than 10,000 Mb/s bandwidth and more than 58 TB storage capacity. Nexio Farad makes building a storage system that meets individual needs simple, thanks to its scale-out architecture, which allows bandwidth and capacity to be accommodated independently of each other. Customers can achieve the system design they need, without compromising on performance, channel count, file-based I/O or their preference of compression technology.

Compatibility with Nexio AMP and Volt servers, Velocity editors, Apple Final Cut Pro and a range of media appliances are all assured for higher performance. The system is equipped with inherent RAID-601 storage protection to maintain system performance and resilience, and provide complete redundancy and backup without degrading system performance. It is coupled with unattended, fully automatic drive rebuilds and a system monitoring and notifications system.

To help streamline workflows in today's multiformat environments, Harris further noted it introduced an ingest and playout support for two new codecs in its Nexio platform: for playout, the H.264 video compression standard; and for production, the Avid DNxHD "mastering" format for post-editing. Native playout support in Nexio AMP and Volt servers means that no transcoder is required to handle H.264 or DNxH. In many competing products, customers would have to buy additional hardware to support these codecs. Unique to Nexio, all supported codecs can be played back-to-back in any order with all other supported codecs. As the new codecs are implemented in software, they are turned on via a simple software license key.