According to tests conducted by DataDirect Networks, the company's S2A9900 storage appliance can support more than 30 Apple Final Cut Pro sessions running on uncompressed HD in real time.

“When running multiple Final Cut Pro sessions in parallel, only DataDirect Networks ensures that users experience extremely low latency response times for jitter-free playback while concurrently performing full-bandwidth ingests,” says DataDirect CTO Dave Fellinger.

“DataDirect Networks has demonstrated highly scalable support of Apple Final Cut Pro collaborative workflows,” says Tom Coughlin, president of rich media research firm Coughlin Associates. “Its S2A technology is clearly a leader in supporting the needs of the postproduction market by providing products geared toward the unique needs of this industry. The ability to provide excellent video quality-of-service in a heavy-use, high-definition environment has made the company a leading supplier for Final Cut Pro collaborative environments.”

DataDirect Networks’ eighth generation S2A platform, the S2A9900, provides extreme performance and scalable capacity, with the ability to manage 1.2 petabytes in only two floor tiles and deliver sustained throughput of up to 6GB/s for both writes and reads, per appliance. In a cluster formation, S2A platforms currently deliver more than 100GB/s of throughput in high-performance customer environments.

The S2A9900 storage platform writes data as fast as it reads it, with guaranteed quality-of-service, which translates into consistently predictable performance for large content files and the ingest of multiple data streams critical for broadcasters, postproduction facilities and video-on-demand providers.