Beta sight: AMCC 3ware Sidecar

When Photo News Media founder Michael Lewis (pictured above) needed a RAID storage solution for rugged, on-location news broadcasting, he turned to the 3ware Sidecar from AMCC.

It was just another typical day for our news-content company. Hurricane Dean had made landfall as a Category 5 storm in Mexico's Costa Maya region. Dean was the first hurricane to make landfall in the Atlantic basin at Category-5 intensity in 15 years, and we were right in the middle of it. We were the only news crew other than NBC and some of their affiliates to make it that far south to report on the story. While the hurricane raged on, we fed video footage to a dozen networks, both international and across the United States.

My company specializes in delivering content from hard-to-reach locations from around the world. Whether we're providing coverage in a combat zone to major news networks or we're in the middle of a hurricane, it's critical for us to be there first and broadcast from where the news is happening. Of course, our equipment is designed to make this a reality. Our hurricane news truck is a rugged Hummer H1 that has the ability to run on bio-diesel. Our weatherproof, bonded Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN)-based equipment shoots through heavy cloud cover with a streaming data rate of 512kbps and the compression technology to pump our video feed anywhere live.

So whether we're enduring 100mph winds or bullets whizzing by, the last thing I want to think about is my storage.

What could be interesting about the 9,541 videotapes that cram-pack my office storage room? Do I worry about the Florida salt air corroding them? Yes. Could I find some old footage if necessary? Possibly, but that's only because we have them barcoded. Business got a lot more interesting last November when we went completely tapeless.

Like most digital-video crews, we're finding that we're much more generous with our shooting. We'll take 30 minutes of footage and want to save the 40GB to 50GB of uncompressed video, cuts, edits, and all. We use a variety of cameras — our tapeless cameras being the Panasonic AJ-HPX2000 and AG-HVX200 and Sony PMW-EX1 XDCAM. With some of our cameras holding as many as five 32GB cards, data capacity quickly became a problem. Dumping this data onto inexpensive hard-disk drives worked well, except another problem arose in the editing process: the performance in accessing and running the data from the drives. It sounded to us like a recipe for RAID.

Many professionals in the AV business, such as postproduction houses, are already using redundant array of inexpensive (or independent) disks (RAID) to provide data performance and redundancy protection. Simply put, by striping data across a number of disk drives, data is more highly protected from drive failure. The RAID storage system we sought out needed to be large enough to handle our ever-growing data requirements. Being a Mac shop, we wanted a truly Mac-dedicated product that would integrate easily into our production workflow and support both our Florida and California locations.

The 3ware Sidecar (bottom right) is a Mac- and PC-compatible storage system that holds four SATA/SATA II disk drives and is ideal for hosting multiple large jobs.

The RAID storage system that fit our requirements? The 3ware Sidecar from AMCC. It holds four SATA II disk drives (up to 4TB in capacity), which is ideal for holding multiple large jobs. If we choose, we can flip a lever on the unit and slide out one to all four drives for temporary storage or longer-term archiving. Disk drives are inexpensive enough now that we are using them for archiving, and we have implemented a barcode system as well.

The RAID controller gives us read and write times of 200MB at RAID 5, a level optimized for maximum data protection while maintaining performance. This makes editing much faster and sharing files between studios much easier.

The system does not generate a lot of heat, and more importantly, it's quiet. Its small size makes it ideal for working in the field, such as situations where a hotel room might be serving as your base of operations. The 3ware Sidecar's small size is even confusing for some, and I've had people ask me if the system is a power supply.

Our technology has been central to our success and ability to stay competitive in today's immediate news environment, where anyone who is at the right place and time can shoot video with a mobile phone and have a global news outlet run it. At the same time, mainstream news teams are continuously improving their equipment and outreach capabilities.

One way to keep ahead was to toughen up our equipment, so we had it ruggedized in order to allow us to travel to hard-to-reach places. First with our truck and then with our cameras, we began to build a set of tools that made our jobs easier and our footage more attractive to news outlets. We soon realized — mainly through colleagues asking us about our equipment — that we had done a good job in selecting the right tools and could offer this equipment as a business itself, serving the professional mobile news broadcasting industry.

To address this opportunity, LiveXposure was formed separately from Photo News Media. To get stories out fast, we created the LiveXposure Anywhere Box: an all-in-one field encoder and built-in cellular pipe that can plug into any available transmission connection. The box uses four bonded cellular air cards to provide up to 2MB upload speeds and can simultaneously stream video while recording video clips, data, and stills. If a cellular network is not available, the user can plug in to any network connection, including satellite modems. We wrapped the solution in a rugged, weatherproof case that can be used when closed and that can fit into the overhead bin of an airplane.

Building a distribution server (which uses an Apple Xserve to house the QuickTime streaming server) was the next natural step. Video playout can be stored on a remote server using built-in disks to an external RAID system for security and redundancy. Lastly, we felt that the aforementioned ruggedized, bonded BGAN terminal would round out the typical needs of a mobile news broadcast team.

So during brushfire season, for war coverage, or for the next big hurricane, we'll be ready for anything that meets us on the road or back in the studio.

Michael Lewis is the founder and director of news operations for Photo News Media and a founding member of mobile news solution provider LiveXposure.