Let There Be Speed

Fiber Channel Shared Storage
Products Introduced

by Todd Busch

Transoft Technology Corporation CEO Michael Klein and his staff of engineers and programmers displayed their latest products for the Westside Avid Feature Film Users Group and the Editors Guild on December 13th at Sony Studios. Transoft has been committed to high-speed storage access from their inception in 1992, and closely associated with the film community since 1994 when they developed MediaShare for use with the Avid Media/Film Composer. MediaShare allows multiple workstations to access media off the same media storage devices. The success of the now discontinued product was offset by its limitations such as its 80' radius from CPU to media storage, its limited through-put capacity and allowable on-line devices.

For the past four years Transoft has been working on Storage Area Networking (SAN) which is a group of servers, or workstations, attached to storage devices without the use of a server. SAN with fiber channel gives you access to your external devices that is many times faster than your CPU's internal drive. Typical fast and wide SCSI has an access time of 20MB/s, while fiber channel runs at a breathtaking 200MB/s, and can be set up over a much wider 10 kilometer radius, which means those droning media towers can now be set-up in the building next door.

Another great advantage of the SAN network is its 126 device/loop capability, each port maintaining the 200MB/s bandwidth, making even the highest video resolutions a breeze. Each loop has one active fabric port, allowing you to continue adding loops of 126 devices up to a maximum 16 million SCSI devices on-line at a single time, instead of the normal limits of eight or sixteen. Each user is totally independent from the other, so that if one workstation on the network crashes, the other users are left totally unaffected.

Transoft's StudioBOSS FC software product takes the place of MediaShare's MSScanner as network administrator. It is more user friendly than its predecessor, allowing you to check a drive's available space with a double click. It can be used on any configuration of drives and is compatible with Windows NT, Silicon Graphics platforms and most open operating systems.

Nearly a dozen studio feature films are currently using Transoft's networking products, and with their success this competitively priced product will in-evitably change the way editors-and assistants-work. The groundwork for an entirely digital post-production has been made a reality.

In the afternoon session of the meeting Avid presented their Fiber Channel which is not quite as advanced as Transoft's yet, but the ability for picture departments to turn over their locked reels to the dialogue editors via network and cc: ADR, Foley, effects, the trailer department, and visual effects (at three different local sites) is at hand. Now can anyone out there say "encryption"?

For more information visit Transoft on the web, send an e-mail or contact their sales staff at (800) 949-6463 x6