Bigger, greener and more affordable: Archive Storage in 2014

GB Labs innovates to bring massive storage capacities at a new price level and with a lower environmental footprint

With ever growing archives, broadcasters and content owners globally are having to invest continually in new tier two storage. The growth in nearline systems is also having an enormous impact on power consumption and environmental cooling requirements.

Energy-efficient Storage

At NAB 2014, GB Labs, a leader in multi-tier network attached storage (NAS), unveils a new range of Eco archive storage systems. Suitable for local or cloud installation, the new ECHO (16 bay) (Eco) and ECHO (36 bay) (Eco) are very high capacity tier two systems with the speed needed for instant clip previews and high-speed data transfer either to tier one storage or into deep tape archive. With new generation system architecture in play, both achieve up-to 45% power efficiencies compared with the previous version.

With cooler running for lower air conditioning costs, ECHO (36 bay) can host up-to 192TB from a single 4U chassis, a further saving on rack space and energy usage. Both factors are important considerations for broadcasters in their total cost of ownership calculations and come on top of the comparatively low initial investment.

New 1 Petabyte price point

Ben Pearce, Sales and Marketing Director at GB Labs comments: “Not only is ECHO 36 (Eco) the most cost-effective nearline storage that we’ve ever produced, but it also has the lowest environmental footprint and it’s the largest capacity system in our history. We can now offer a Petabyte of fast tier two storage for under $300,000, which is unprecedented.”

ECHO (36 bay) (Eco) uses new high capacity disks for native capacities up-to 192TB. With dedicated expansion units, this can be increased non-destructively to 3 Petabytes. SPACE tier two storage can be scaled instantly to meet the ever-growing archive needs.