Proprietary Fibre Channel and Scale-Out NAS storage can’t keep up with modern workflow requirements.
The inexorable data growth of higher-resolution media assets makes the economics of processing and staging data on these expensive solutions untenable. There is a better way: introducing PixStor.
Introducing PixStor
Guaranteed 99% Consistent Performance For Any Workflow
Other storage platforms claim to deliver performance. We guarantee it for any workflow over the lifetime of the system.
Data-Driven Efficiencies & Business Advantage
Leverage the Policy and Event Engine to meet your exact business needs, with data-driven automated tools to optimise your media process workflow.
Transparent Data Tiering to NAS, Object, Tape, and the Cloud
Reserves high speed storage for work in progress, moves everything else to low cost archive, while maintaining a single view of all data.
A Seamless Management Experience For All
From remote VFX artist to SysAdmin, choose the best management view for you with a seamless experience of the entire data ecosystem.
PixStor Liberates Your Entire Workflow, Without Compromise
PixStor is high performance, highly scalable, enterprise-class software-defined storage platform that empowers creative studios to search, manage, securely isolate and protect their data, collaborate and share across distance, and run in the cloud. The foundation of PixStor leverages industry-standard compute, flash and disk platforms and high performance Ethernet to deliver a unified system that guarantees performance with limitless scale at lower cost than traditional legacy solutions. Data moves seamlessly through many tiers of storage – from fast flash and disk tiers to cost-effective, high capacity object storage, all the way out to the cloud – backed by a policy and event engine that puts all data at artists’ fingertips. This allows media organizations to accelerate high resolution workflows and store valuable assets safely and economically.
PixStor provides a truly unified platform with automated tools to drive efficiency throughout the entire workflow; delivering limitless performance, scale and control for all – without compromise.
PixStor is powered by a proven high-performance parallel file system trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide. PixStor can easily manage petabytes of data and billions of files, all under a single global namespace. The data architecture foundation relies on a scatter algorithm to distribute writes across spinning disk, removing the impact of fragmentation on performance so there is no bandwidth degradation as the system fills – as is common on most file systems. The performance of the system enables multiple workloads to run full out up at to 99% capacity – with no negative effect on finishing editors’ or artists’ user experience.
All other high-performance shared-access storage solutions require defragmentation to restore performance as they fill, causing downtime and loss of bandwidth. With the introduction of modern flash technologies, PixStor now supports the latest in NVMeOF, creating an ultrafast Tier-0 extreme-performance storage layer alongside traditional spinning disk tiers, all within a single namespace. There’s literally no creative project that exceeds PixStor’s scalable performance capabilities.
New to PixStor
Seamless Deployment to the Cloud for Workflow Flexibility
PixStor expands your workflows cost-effectively into the cloud with fully-automated seamless deployment to cloud market-places. Enable hybrid workflows for burst render and cloud-first workflows for global collaboration – all with the guaranteed performance, scalability and actionable data tooling benefits of the PixStor platform.
PixStor will soon be available in the Google Cloud Platform marketplace, followed shortly by AWS and Azure.
Stringent Security for A-List Clients
PixStor Containers Services address industry demands for the highest levels of security and data separation to protect high-value assets. Containers unlock true multi-tenancy from a single storage fabric. This enables creative studios to deploy audit-compliant media environments at scale, by hosting isolated instances of SMB and NFS across multiple networks with no performance overhead. Containers are to NAS storage what VLANs are to networking: boundaries between NAS shares, providing true data separation from a single PixStor system.
Aligned to stringent TPN security accreditation standards, PixStor helps manage the bottom line whilst keeping high-value assets safe to attract A-List clients.
Fast, Easy & Accurate Search - Direct from the Desktop
PixStor includes enhanced Search, an easy-yet-powerful tool providing fast indexing and search capabilities across all your creative assets. Designed to handle hundreds of millions of files and leveraging Machine Learning and AI third-party tools such as Machinebox and Azure Cognitive Learning, it harvests, tags and exposes your data to allow meaningful searches across the entire global namespace – with no impact on the filesystem performance.
Its intuitive interface reveals these assets at the Desktop level (via an Adobe Premiere Pro plugin) for quick insertion into creative applications – delivering a seamless experience for artist-anywhere workflows.
Complete Data Awareness and Lightning Fast Search
Intuitive user defined metadata harvesting, tagging and easy search for data – no more tree walks or lost data
Multi-protocol
SMBv2/3, NFS, FTP, HTTP, S3, HDFS and POSIX parallel file system client for extreme performance
PixStor Web Interface
PixStor includes Nexus – an easy-to-manage storage interface with centralized control of all file system components. Nexus provides a graphical dashboard for monitoring, alerts and performance analytics of daily PixStor tasks, and is tailored to the exact needs of the administrator to empower the organization with unprecedented insight into data usage and trends.
- Secure, single pane of glass interface for monitoring & managing
- Snapshot control
- Fileset management
- Performance Dashboards & Capacity Analytics
- NFS & SMB Share management
- Remote call home enablement & Support logging
- Built on ArcaPix Python API
Python and REST APIs
Pixit Media’s focus on workflow solutions led to development of PixStor’s Actionable Data Toolset, composed of Python and REST APIs for file system automation and integration. As workflow solutions experts, Pixit Media engineered PixStor so it can be tailored to the needs of every creative studio organization, such as pipeline tooling capability and delivery.
- The ArcaPix Python API provides an easy to learn, pythonic interface into the filesystem
- The API extends integration of various filesystem functions to applications and users.
- Metadata search and retrieval
- Data lifecycle curation
- Snapshot control
- Security Management
- Rapid development of new automations and interfaces
- PixStor’s OAuth2 compliant REST interface also provides:
- Simple GET/PUT interaction with the filesystem
- Asynchronous control of all available management features
PixStor Fully Protected Storage
- Asynchronous replication through PixStor data management tools
- Data is constantly scanned for changes and replicated to anywhere in the world
- DR Sites provides snapshot-driven version control
- 100% software defined – no specialist hardware required
The Software Defined Economic Advantage
PixStor is deployed as software-defined storage on industry-standard hardware, with no vendor lock-in, and includes most data protection services at no extra charge – providing media organizations economic advantage and more purchasing power, now and in the future. The PixStor architecture scales in capacity, performance and capability – on premise and in the cloud – linearly and independently, by simply adding components to the existing infrastructure.
And since PixStor is completely open, new technology like NVMe and the latest object storage or cloud integration can be easily added from multiple vendors moving forward, ensuring economic architectural longevity that’s adaptable to meet the most demanding media data management and workflow challenges the future brings.
Unrivalled "Disk to Desktop" Support For The Entire Architecture
We provide direct access to knowledgeable support expertise fulfilled by Pixit Media support engineers who come from the M&E industry.
Uniquely, PixitMedia provides a single point of contact for all support issues including all industry-standard hardware components in the PixStor architecture– crucial in a ‘best of breed’, multi-vendor solution. All hardware and software escalation is performed by our support engineers…we’ll do the chasing on your behalf.
