Pixit Media
Shaping Storage Technology into Single Collaborative Workspace

There is no denying of the fact that the amount of data, organizations in the broadcast and visual effects industries have to store and access is growing faster than the available budgets needed for infrastructure expansion. What follows is that the firms are now either opting for ‘islands’ of separate, lower costs storage space or expanding their existing storage infrastructure. But, both of these solutions are inept as they result in truncation of the workflow or exhaustion of salient finance that could be leveraged elsewhere. In addition, traditional hard¬ware and cloud infrastructure providers are more centered towards volume sales, rather than enhancing the customer’s workflow. Pixit Media, a UK based company helps businesses within the media sector to achieve highly scalable, efficient, and enterprise-class storage, network and archive solutions with a sharp focus on workflow and productivity.

”We deliver solutions by combining the same data management benefits many proprietary appliances offer, but with the freedom to choose the most appropriate storage hardware for the given tier,” says Barry Evans, Founder and Technical Di¬rector at Pixit Media. Media professionals are provided with the capability to automatically migrate and place petabytes of assets into virtualized pools of commodity storage hardware. Customers can access their assets from the same virtual location in the overall namespace without administrative intervention no matter where the data is actually located.

Pixit Media is known for its software-defined PixStor architecture, a scale-out NAS and SAN solution, which prof¬fer flexible scalability and predictable performance, without relying on expensive and proprietary hardware technology. It enables scale-out file, block and object data access across the most appropriate and cost-efficient hardware, customers can find at the time of purchase. Another amenity of PixStor is its usage of certified components that can be blended with the life of the solution, empowering customers with freedom from vendor lock-in and massively reducing purchase, growth and support costs.

Though the heterogeneous nature of open, software-defined storage and

We provide the glue to allow a resilient, scalable service with a data management and policy layer that ties all of the varying technology into a single repository

networking approaches tend to get quite complex, Pixit Media, simplifies it through its managed service offerings. With the single point of contact support offerings of Pixit Media, customers can consolidate their entire aspects of storage, server and network support requirements into a single contact point. Additionally, the company also provides installation, support and maintenance, and financial consulting in its portfolio, which, together, allow the clients to spare an immense lump of capital.“We provide the glue to allow a cost-effective, resilient, and scalable service with a data management layer that ties all of the varying technology into a single repository,” explains Evans. Pixit Media has a scintillating clientele list that includes various firms coming from the broadcast and visual effects industries. One such firm is WRN Broadcast that approached Pixit Media, to propose a bespoke storage architecture to meet its requirements. Pixit Media provided WRN Broadcast with a cost-effective dual-head scale-out NAS solution powered by Pixit Media’s enhanced version of the GPFS file system. This solution empowered WRN Broadcast to aggregate multiple servers and entry-level storage arrays into a single, highly resilient content store that could be quickly expanded up to multi-petabyte level, as future requirements demand, with a linear increase in performance.

Going forward, Pixit Media is planning to release a python-based Application Programming Interface to help bring the data closer to the applications accessing it. “This will empower our customers to further extend the usability of solution and the management of the data to their exact requirements,” says Barry. The company is also looking for¬ward to their integration with existing third-party asset and data management software, such as Resource Space and General Atomics' Nirvana.