Avid ISIS: Unmatched Storage Flexibility & Cornerstone of Collaboration

Avid Blogs by Dennis Mahoney

When I talk to customers about what they like most about Avid ISIS shared storage, a common response is always around how flexible and easy it is to manage. While this may sound like something that every shared storage vendor should be able to boast about, most cannot. The architecture of Avid ISIS provides levels of storage management that are uniquely tailored to meet the needs of media professionals. In this article, I’ll highlight the architecture and some of the management features that separate Avid ISIS from the rest.

The architecture of Avid ISIS provides levels of storage management that are uniquely tailored to meet the needs of media professionals.

Microservers

One of the powerful technologies that make ISIS unique is the concept of the “microserver”. This technology allows multiple servers to work together to optimize and protect the massive amount of media assets common in today’s workflows. The microserver makes it possible to flexibly expand or reduce the size of your whole storage configuration while scaling the capacity and bandwidth available for both existing and new content through the unique ISIS process of redistribution. The microserver architecture, combined with ISIS mirroring on ISIS 7000 | 7500, provides for the fastest possible recovery time.

For ISIS 7000 | 7500, the microserver is also known as an ISIS Storage Blade (ISB). Each ISB has two hard disk drives (HDD’s) that are connected to a server board with its own processor, memory, network connectivity, and operating system- hence the term Microserver. There are 16 of these ISB’s/microservers in each ISIS 7500 Engine while on ISIS 5500, a 16 drive engine is considered a microserver and on ISIS 2000, a fully populated 84 drive engine is considered two microservers while a half populated ISIS 2000 engine is considered a single microserver. read more...