2016... It's A Wrap!

As the sun sets on 2016, SGL reflects on what's been a highly successful year, says Lee Sheppard, SGL's Director of Product Management.

The company has announced new projects and partnerships; key customer sales; and major product launches, not least the unveiling of the new FlashNet Infinity dashboard in the spring. Providing broadcasters and content owners with an elegant interface that simplifies the management of media archives, Infinity delivers a sophisticated toolset for archive and restore functionality, system health, monitoring, analysis, and more, and is available as a free upgrade to all SGL FlashNet users covered by a current support contract.

FlashNet Infinity takes a novel approach to the management of archived assets. While FlashNet itself is optimised for enterprise-level archiving, with the capability for automatic fail-over and for distributed processing of very high levels of activity, Infinity is designed specifically for high-performance search, monitoring and analysis. To manage the sometimes-conflicting objectives of very efficient throughput and equally efficient data analysis, the processing and database demands of FlashNet and Infinity are managed separately. Two separate but connected SQL Server databases store FlashNet's transactional information and Infinity's metadata and summary data. The two databases can be run on the same or separate servers, depending on requirements.

Launched at IBC 2016 and featuring Infinity is SGL's new entry-level archive, FlashNet Lite, which comes in four configurations: FL Disk, FL Tape, FL Hybrid and FL Optical Disk. Running on a single server node, FlashNet Lite can grow as the customer's archive expands. The software includes important FlashNet tools including: integration with a wide range of partner solutions and storage devices; business storage rules; and partial file restore.

In the summer, SGL shared in the excitement of the Rio Olympics 2016. Creating the world's biggest live television event comes with a lot of pressure and as a long time host broadcaster NBC Olympics has to ensure that the technology that it has in place from acquisition through to delivery is first-rate. One of the key elements of the workflow is the SGL FlashNet archive, which NBC Olympics first started using in Athens in 2004. Much of that content is still regularly accessed, having been automatically migrated across generations of physical storage by the sophisticated content management software that is SGL FlashNet.

Throughout the year SGL has continued to highlight support for its partners. At NAB, SGL demonstrated FlashNet's integration with Marquis Parking, which enables MAM, PAM and automation systems to integrate to all the major storage management solutions whether on tape, disk, cloud or optical disk. This includes a rich integration with Avid Interplay | Production and Avid Interplay | MAM. This integration with Avid solutions has been further enhanced with Project Parking from Marquis.

At IBC 2016 SGL highlighted its co-operation with media cloud services. SGL now supports Ci, Sony's cloud-based service that allows media professionals to collaborate on the creation and sharing of high quality, high resolution content. The SGL integration with Ci means that broadcasters and content owners can quickly and easily transfer material directly to the cloud from their MAM system using SGL FlashNet. As well as Ci, SGL also supports Aspera and Amazon S3 via ExpeDat Gateway.

Looking ahead to 2017, SGL will continue to work in collaboration with major vendors in the media industry providing customers with leading archive management solutions utilising the latest technological advances. As workflows begin to utilise the cloud more fully, as new standards emerge, as disaster recovery models become more sophisticated, SGL's FlashNet will continue to stay at the forefront of innovation.

www.sglbroadcast.com

(JP/LM)