NAB 2020 Preview

Ryan Salazar finds out more from Dominic Harland for Broadcast Beat

Ryan Salazar:

I'm Ryan Salazar with NAB Show Live and I'm so excited about the 2020 NAB Show because, well there's toys everywhere, technology, best practice discussions and here's an expert himself - Dominic Harland, CEO and CTO at GB Labs. How’re you doing sir?

Dominic Harland:

Very good, thank you Ryan. Very good.

Ryan Salazar:

It's great to be with you and great to chat with you again, so I've noticed that GB Labs, your logo underneath it, has “Intelligent Storage” - tell us about that.

Dominic Harland:

Okay, so with our central storage systems we've noticed many, many years ago actually, that you have to really control the performance from the disks, and we are in a unique position. We can understand all of what's required from us and asked of us from the various systems on the network, and we're then balancing that with the characteristics of SSD, NVMe or hard drive underneath so making live, intelligent decisions on who gets what, based on, not only a priority, but also what is usefully needed across the network, and that was the fundamental change-point of when we started tagging ourselves, if you like, with “Intelligent Storage”, and we've developed a number of other technologies on top of that since.

Ryan Salazar:

Well you guys are certainly leaders in our industry, and you must be very proud of what you've built over the years. I think it's very exciting as, of course we're all about NAB Show, what can we expect to see from GB Labs this year at the show?

Dominic Harland:

This year we’re bringing our latest Analytics Centre to market, and this is giving users a fantastic view into what's actually going on, on their networks, and with their storage.

We've had a like a one “pane of glass” view of what's going on for the last year or two, and we've upped that, there's a lot of requirements now in the industry to have traceability and tracking, and we've introduced that into the Analytics Centre, and we'll be demonstrating that at NAB, so you can see the things from who's using what files - how much data they are consuming, where it's going to, etc.

Ryan Salazar:

We interview a lot of exhibitors, there's about 1700 I believe, and it's interesting the crossover into other industries that many of these of these exhibitors have. We spoke with another company yesterday, they deal a lot with SAP integration and SAP is dealing with some serious enterprise technology, database technology for the most part, so your technology, how does it benefit folks in corporate America? Let's think of medical or even defence?

Dominic Harland:

Yeah, these days the Media and Entertainment business is, I guess, the core part of of our business historically, but there are so many different companies using media and they're all experiencing the same challenges with media, and really, anybody who's using media has the same issues that, within media we very rarely want a whole file. And that whole process of how that data is moved around networks or workstations with an organisation is very different to normal IT data.

We do have, in fact actually, we started off doing military products and we still have military customers, medical is a big market for us as well, but it's all media specific, and what our products do particularly well for those industries who are not used to typical media entertainment is, they shine a clear light on using standard technology. We're all NAS based, so the the concept of our product is very easy to grasp, and to integrate, but obviously we're delivering the requirements specifically that media requires. What we're doing for those industries, is we’re making it very simple for their IT guys to integrate into their corporate networks, such as; Active Directory and all the rest of the stuff that they’re used to, but giving them the power that they require for media.

Ryan Salazar:

Very nice all right so every time I talk with somebody in one of these interviews about NAB Show, I always want to ask, you've been going any be show for a long time Dominic, is there a cool restaurant or cool part of town, I have never been to Old Town believe it or not - I don't know how that happened, I've been going to NAB for ten years! Guess I'm working too much when I'm out there. Our readers have been sending us suggestions so, a recent suggestion was Yellowtail at The Bellagio, I'm not sure what kind of food they have but do you have a place that you'd like to hang out at the show while you're at the show?

Dominic Harland:

I do and you've put me on the spot because I can't remember the name of the place actually the Bellagio has it has a great little place actually called “Noodles” which I like but that's just because it's usually quick and easy to get into, with decent food. There is a fantastic Thai restaurant just off the strip and, for the life of me I can't remember the name of it, but I think having been for probably the best part of 20 years now, my favourite place honestly is probably the journey back home.

Ryan Salazar:

Exactly, except for that you have to fly a “red-eye”, at least for me, going back to the to the East Coast. Alright, awesome, I can't wait to see you guys Dominic Harland - CEO and CTO at GB Labs. We're going to see you at booth SL5324 at the 2020 NAB Show.

GB Labs FastNAS F-16 Nitro Installed at Kingdom Creative.

Aldermaston, UK, 17 February 2020 - GB Labs, innovators of powerful and intelligent media storage solutions for the media and entertainment industries, today confirmed that the specialist video production company, Kingdom Creative Studios, has installed GB Labs’ FastNAS F-16 Nitro storage system.

Kingdom Creative founder and Managing Director, Simon Harrison, said, “Our talented in- house team works closely with major brands - primarily in automotive but rapidly expanding into new markets - to deliver powerful video content tailored to engage audiences on every platform, from television to social media.

“However, our expansion, coupled with the advent of 4K, multi-cam shoots and the increasing demand for rapid turnaround, meant that we reached the practical limits of what our existing storage system could do. We had to find a better way to manage and operate storage.”

For the majority of its existence, Kingdom Creative had relied on what many still rely on today, i.e., storing video content on individual drives, backing them up, and walking them up and down corridors or transferring them via couriers.

“As we began taking on larger and more complicated projects,” said Kingdom Creative Head of Creative Technology Ben Treston, “especially when collaboration between editors became important, it turned out that the old methods were no longer viable. Today, we have multiple editors working on many pieces of content from the same project. You can’t share individual hard drives and meet today’s expectations for speed and reliability in those types of scenarios.”

The FastNAS F-16 Nitro system meets those objectives for speed, reliability and value in shared storage. Unlike other NAS products on the market, FastNAS is purpose built to sustain heavy workloads and provide stable and reliable performance, based on best of breed technology exclusively developed in-house, and is comprised of a high-performance unit with unique hybrid disk technology, powered by GB Labs’ proprietary CORE OS.

GB Labs CEO-CTO Dominic Harland said, “Kingdom Creative emerged from a motorsport world built for speed, and that’s what modern shared storage has been engineered to deal with. FastNAS F-16 Nitro easily accommodates the need for speed – and safety – when dealing with fast turnarounds and sharp bends.”

GB Labs to feature Mosaic and CORE.4 Lite at CABSAT 2020

Stand G3-24, CABSAT 2020, Dubai: Leaders in intelligent storage solutions, GB Labs, will showcase its award-winning Mosaic automatic asset organiser and the new CORE.4 Lite operating system during CABSAT 2020 at the Dubai World Trade Centre from 28 March – 2 April.

The Mosaic asset organiser makes it far easier to quickly search for, retrieve, and view video assets. Mosaic automatically scans all inbuilt metadata and integrates it with AI tagging enabling the ability to store, catalogue and access assets with no need for manual intervention, making it a substantial time and money saver.

GB Labs new CORE.4 Lite operating system is a custom OS specifically designed to serve media files. Its high degree of speciality guarantees stable performance for every user, whether as workgroups or individuals, while maximising the efficiency of every disk.

A powerful new feature included with CORE.4 is Analytics Centre, a dashboard that runs in the background of GB Labs intelligent storage devices and continuously analyses the network, providing complete visibility of exactly how, and by whom, data is being used.

GB Labs CEO-CTO Dominic Harland said, “Read/write speeds are usually compromised by a misconfigured network, which wastes resources. But configuration issues can be difficult to locate and resolve manually. Analytics Centre automatically analyses the read/write process through the network with specially designed algorithms that identifies, locates, and suggests how to resolve any issues, often before they occur, thereby eliminating the need for painstaking manual intervention.”

GB Labs will also demonstrate how its proprietary Dynamic Bandwidth Control identifies and selects high, medium, and low priority users to guarantee that the storage system automatically adjusts to operate at peak performance for all.

According to Harland, “Dynamic Bandwidth Control makes storage malleable to ensure it can flexibly respond to changes in usage priorities without breaking. This is unique to GB Labs and can be implemented whether storage is in use by one user or an entire workgroup.”

For backup and archiving, the exhibition stand workspaces will be coupled with GB Labs EasyLTO, an easy-to-use, cost-effective, all-in-one, high-speed solution.

Finally, the company will also discuss the success of recent GB Labs deployments to new customers including M for Media; Qatl Al Youm TV; Polimer TV; Craft; Kalvi TV; and Madha TV.

GB Labs can be found on Stand G3-24 throughout CABSAT 2020.

Abu Dhabi production house chooses GB Labs FastNAS intelligent storage

The GB Labs FastNAS F-16 Nitro system installed at M for Media by MediaCast can be accessed by up to 10 users of Avid Media Composer, simultaneously if required.

M for Media, an Abu Dhabi-based media production house, which produces TV shows and adapts international formats for the GCC and MENA region, has installed GB Labs’ FastNAS shared storage system. GB Labs develops intelligent storage solutions for the media and entertainment industries. The system was supplied and installed by Dubai-based distributor MediaCast.

Speaking about the install, M for Media’s Andre Aouad said: “I first heard about GB Labs from the creator of MIMIQ for Avid systems, who forwarded some information that he thought would interest me. It did, particularly because, at the time, we had no existing storage and it was rapidly becoming a problem because of the volume of work we were taking in. You can’t keep running back and forth with arms full of hard disks. It’s unproductive, and it was beginning to show. However, GB Labs soon came up with the ideal solution.”

The GB Labs FastNAS F-16 Nitro system installed at M for Media by MediaCast can be accessed by up to 10 users of Avid Media Composer, simultaneously if required.

GB Labs recently introduced even more acceleration for FastNAS storage systems with the introduction of new 25 GbE connectivity.

GB Labs CEO-CTO Dominic Harland added: “Ultimately, the engine of the newly 25 GbE-enabled FastNAS is our powerful CORE.4 OS, an ultra-high-performance operating system that serves media files with intelligence layers that deliver high stability and unparalleled quality of service. We are delighted to have been referred to M for Media by acknowledged experts, which is further evidence of our growing reputation for excellence.”

According to Aouad: “Recognising that we needed to make a change, we had made numerous enquiries for recommendations for a shared storage system and felt that GB Labs offered the best value and highest performance ratio versus any other solution on the market. Once we had taken the decision, we were up and running with FastNAS very quickly and the benefits we expected were almost instantly felt. We have had a very positive experience with FastNAS and are already looking forward to working with GB Labs on future projects.”