Harmonic, EVS Secures New OEM Partnership to Simplify Storage Deployments

Harmonic and EVS has publicized a new OEM partnership that simplifies storage deployments in professional media environments. EVS has adopted the Harmonic MediaGrid system as its new nearline storage solution, marketing it under the XStore brand. The new XStore storage solution increases flexibility and scalability for studios, broadcast centers and major broadcasting facilities via its “Grow-as-you-Go” architecture.

“Harmonic truly understands the bandwidth and processing demands of video, and our customers will greatly benefit from the MediaGrid system’s fully distributed scale-out architecture and simplified approach to managing storage capacity,” says Nicolas Bourdon, senior vice president, marketing, at EVS. “By leveraging MediaGrid technology, our next-generation XStore product provides broadcasters and other media processionals with a highly reliable, scalable, and high-performance media storage solution that meets the complex requirements of live and near-live production. Beyond wanting to bring the powerful capabilities of the MediaGrid system to our customers, we ultimately chose Harmonic based on their willingness to work closely and diligently with the EVS team to ensure perfect integration with our industry-leading workflows.”

XStore is based on a highly scalable architecture, with solutions starting at 28TB in 6RU and scaling up to 500TB when higher capacities are needed. With its high-density form factor, the XStore platform provides users with valuable space-saving benefits.

With MediaGrid technology powering the new XStore platform, EVS can now support the entire media asset workflow, including ingest, playout, archive, edit-in-place, transcoding and OTT adaptive bitrate streaming; with a cost-effective solution that is simple to deploy, manage and scale. MediaGrid is purpose-built from the ground up to deliver high bandwidth and consistent low latency for video.

“The XStore brand has been trusted in production and sports production markets for many years, and Harmonic looks forward to bringing the powerful capabilities of MediaGrid storage to those EVS customers,” says Shahar Bar, senior vice president, corporate development, at Harmonic. “Combining the capabilities of XStore and the MediaGrid system is a win-win situation for media professionals working in live and near-live production, as it allows them to do more; scale up or down in capacity instantly, and lower storage-related costs.”

The XStore system will be rolled out in a number of installations including several upcoming major global sporting events in 2018. One of the first public demonstrations of the system will be at IBC2017 where the in-house TV channel, IBC TV, will use it for the production of live content throughout the show.