SANRAD Dances around Problems of Digitizing Ethnomusicological Video for Two Universities

Business Wire, Jan 11, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO -- iSCSI V-Switch Solution is Music to the Ears of University of Michigan, Indiana University in Bloomington

SANRAD Incorporated, a leader in developing and delivering intelligent iSCSI SAN solutions, announced today that its award-winning V-Switch is helping the University of Michigan and Indiana University in Bloomington permanently preserve libraries of videotape documenting musical and dance traditions from around the world in digital format before the content is lost forever due to degradation of age.

The Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive project is a joint effort between the two universities, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to preserve the video recordings of university instructors and make them easily accessible for future teaching and research. The project utilizes a high-speed storage infrastructure built around SANRAD's iSCSI V-Switch.

Implementing an iSCSI-based SAN with the SANRAD V-Switch solved the storage and file transfer problems of the universities' initial plan. The size of the video files and the speed required to transfer the files between locations proved problematic. The V-Switch has 2 Terabytes of disk capacity attached on the SAN, and UM's high speed network makes its possible to write the 50mb/second video files directly to the iSCSI SAN located across the campus.

"With iSCSI, as I'm encoding in real time, this stuff is going to where it belongs in real time so I don't have to set up this file transfer to run all night and secure the room so no one messes up my transfer," said Dan Hague, Senior Video Engineer for the Information Technology Central Services at the University of Michigan at the time of the project. "As soon as that first video is done, I just stop it and put in the next video. The time savings really start to make a difference when you have 30 instructors' lifetime work to encode."

"SANRAD's V-Switch eliminates the complexity, cost and distance problems that are inherent in ambitious projects such as the EVIA Digital Archive," said Uli Gal-Oz, SANRAD CEO. "By removing barriers associated with large file sizes, remote locations and transfer speeds, we are helping to make learning tools and educational content available to students and facility alike. In fact, campuses around the country are embracing the SANRAD iSCSI V-Switch for its performance, value and high-availability architecture."

SANRAD's innovative iSCSI V-Switch introduces all-in-one iSCSI storage networking, guaranteeing the fully availability and seamless management of stored information across standard Ethernet networks, affording a complete storage continuity solution that is easy to deploy with excellent price/performance. The iSCSI V-Switch is a convergence of functions, which include protocol bridging, storage routing, switching, security, load-balancing, high availability and volume management within a single easy-to-manage platform designed to reduce the inherent complexity of storage networks at a fraction of the cost of a comparable performing Fibre Channel-based SAN.

About SANRAD

SANRAD delivers intelligence at the network layer and is the leader in intelligent IP Storage Networking, enabling hundreds of organizations worldwide to effectively access, share and manage storage across standard Ethernet environments. SANRAD delivers a new dimension in the continuity and simple management of vital business information by coupling standard IP connectivity with network-based storage services to create IP-based Storage Area Networks. SANRAD IP SANs enable full data availability, effective resource provisioning and complete data protection with excellent price/performance. SANRAD's U.S. sales, marketing and support offices are located in Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay Area, Calif., with research and development and international sales offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. SANRAD is backed by leading venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and is a member of the RAD Group, a family of more than 20 independent companies that together make up one of the largest multi-national revenue producers in networking.