Press release from Quinto Communications
Quinto Communications have announced that Melbourne’s RMIT University has taken delivery of the first Omneon MediaGrid system to be used by an Australian educational institution.
Installed and commissioned by Quinto Communications and Omneon engineers, the 72TB MediaGrid solution is unique in that the storage is located at a secure data centre about 25Km from their Melbourne city centre campus buildings where the system editing and ingest functions are located. 　Data is run over 4 x 10Gb/s fibre links between the data centre building and city centre campus buildings, giving users a "local disk" feel and control of the remote data.
In Melbourne, students can now use RMIT’s nineteen Final Cut Pro Edit Suites to access the remote data with no latency issues. This is due to the impressive bandwidth offered by the MediaGrid system when combined with RMIT’s optical fibre network. Additional media, may be ingested through a local Omneon MediaDeck, providing HD-SDI and SD-SDI SDI ingest or playout if required.
According to RMIT’s David Beesley, Technical Services Manager with the School of Media & Communication: "Having already looked at using other types of storage, we choose the MediaGrid which we felt offered substantial technical benefits and cost savings compared to these more traditional storage solutions".
Omneon’s MediaGrid itself can provide storage for Apple, Windows and Linux clients. It seamless integrates into mixed editing environments with both Apple FCP seats and Avid Editing seats. An extensive range of options provide "Grid Powered" Omneon applications such as, ProBrowse browse proxy creation, ProXchange transcoding between different file formats, and ProXplore web based browsing of content.