Products: Avid Unity Isis

While Avid has faced fierce competition in desktop NLEs, the company seems to have few challengers for the high end of networked HD post, where its Avid Unity Isis system plays.

The Tewksbury, Mass.-based company is running with it too, debuting version 2.0 this past December. Now, up to 330 concurrent users can work in realtime. Along with version 2.0 is a massive amount of online storage capacity — 384TB.

Avid expects to sell potential buyers such as the major networks and other living-large producers on reduced administrative costs when compared to maintaining multiple storage systems. Meanwhile, with so much horsepower to spare, the company says that it's now more feasible to give access to all staff involved in the production process.

For HD post, users can connect multiple Avid Symphony systems via 10Gbps Ethernet links; this upgrades storage from legacy SCSI storage while enabling multistream uncompressed HD edits. Unlike a typical SAN architecture, Isis employs a self-balancing blade-style storage subsystem that intelligently optimizes performance.