By Al Griffin
Product Marketing Specialist
agriffin@attotech.com
Challenge
Changes in production workflow requirements are driving a need for sophisticated configurations—ones that maintain high throughput while providing shared access to data. At the same time, workloads are being extended to incorporate mobile workbooks along with in-house workstations. Consequently, a challenge that creative professionals face is being able to access and exchange high-resolution assets from multiple locations, and to do so using the platform of their choice.
Solution: Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt technology endows portable platforms with the power, features and expandability of traditional workstations by connecting workbooks and all-in-ones to high performance storage, external media drives, multiple 4K/HD displays, and 4K/HD media and editing systems. It provides access to storage and networks at speeds up to 20Gb/s and enables video and data carriage via a single cable so users can display uncompressed 4K footage while transferring content over the same connection. Thunderbolt’s hot-plug capability and support for daisy chains also brings flexibility to media workflows by permitting on-the-fly system reconfiguration.
The ATTO Difference
ATTO Technology manufactures the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of Thunderbolt storage and network connectivity solutions. Our
Thunderbolt 2 Desklink devices provide connectivity to 10Gb Ethernet, 16Gb Fibre Channel, and 12Gb SAS infrastructures, delivering accelerated access to external storage and networks for I/O-demanding applications including 2K, 4K and 3D stereoscopic video editing. In addition, Thunderbolt 2 Desklink devices have multiple operating system, port and driver options, and are cross-compatible with standard 10Gb/s Thunderbolt devices and connections.
Backup and Archive
Thunderbolt gives the broadcast and film Industries other options to manage creative assets beyond costly high-speed networked solutions. With the arrival of 4K and 8K formats, traditional storage options are too expensive to accommodate the growing amount of data. A challenge also exists in being able to cost effectively protect content.
Thunderbolt in combination with LTO tape drives provides a solution to these obstacles. Prior to Thunderbolt, transferring large volumes of data involved portable disks—there was no easy way to move content from a mobile computer to tape, which is less expensive. But a Thunderbolt-to-SAS converter such as ATTO Technology’s ThunderLink™ SH 2068 offers a simple and affordable means to store, archive and transport large amounts of content when it’s connected to an LTO SAS tape drive.
Thunderbolt also brings cost benefits to on-location production. Most digital cameras encode images directly to a solid state device (SSD) or removable disk. This media can be quite expensive. Fast drag-and-drop transfers of content to tape via LTFS using mobile computers with Thunderbolt allows for efficient reuse of media, reducing the number of SSDs or disks that must be purchased.
ThunderStream: Scalable Storage with Protection
The need to grow storage capacity on the fly has become more critical than ever in media production. But as storage capacity grows, so too does the need to implement a cohesive backup and recovery workflow.
ATTO’s ThunderStream™ 4808 Desklink device leverages the high-speed Thunderbolt connector on workstations and workbooks to bring high performance to the network edge without the need to reconfigure hardware or introduce costly components. With the ThunderStream 4808, users can quickly scale up a disk storage pool with the confidence that their data will be protected by ATTO’s high performance, low latency RAID engine. And ThunderStream’s ability to support disk and tape on separate channels also facilitates tiered backup by enabling storage offload to archive.
ATTO Technology’s Thunderbolt 2 ThunderLink Desklink device family:
- ThunderLink FC 2162 Thunderbolt 2 to 16Gb Fibre Channel
- ThunderLink NS 2102 Thunderbolt 2 to 10GbE (SFP+ LC optical)
- ThunderLink NT 2102 Thunderbolt 2 to 10GBASE-T (RJ45 copper)
- ThunderLink SH 2068 Thunderbolt 2 to 6Gb/s SAS/SATA
- ThunderStream SC 4808 Thunderbolt 2 to 6Gb/s SAS/SATA RAID
Figure 1 (below): ATTO’s ThunderLink SH 2068 offers a simple and affordable means to store, archive and transport large amounts of content when it’s connected to an LTO SAS tape drive.
Figure 2 (below): With the ThunderStream 4808, users can quickly scale up a disk storage pool with the confidence that their data will be protected by ATTO’s high performance, low latency RAID engine.
Figure 3 (below): ATTO’s Thunderbolt 2 Desklink devices provide connectivity to 10Gb Ethernet, 16Gb Fibre Channel, and 12Gb SAS infrastructures, delivering accelerated access to external storage and networks for I/O-demanding applications.