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Power Behind the Storage
ATTO ExpressSAS RAID Adapter
High-Performance Data Protection
for Biscardi Creative Media
High Definition media production calls for high definition
storage solutions. Biscardi Creative Media is an award-
winning production company based in Atlanta, Georgia
that has collected many Emmy, Telly, Aurora and Cable
Ace Awards for excellence in high-definition broadcast/
post production.
With projects such as Food Network’s popular series
“Good Eats”, and “This American Land” for PBS, a pro-
duction company like this can’t afford to invest in a stor-
age solution that’s not reliable enough to handle an in-
creasing broadcast HD/SD post-production workload.
“With so much broadcast work and other deadline-
intensive projects, we simply cannot afford to have any
storage issues,” says owner Walter Biscardi. “Is the
storage going to be there when I turn it on tomorrow?”
Biscardi Creative was using an older 2TB Fibre Channel
array that had been their workhorse for 2 years, but they
knew the time had come to expand their storage
capacity.
To address the problem, Biscardi evaluated several
SATA and FireWire 800 arrays, but “we simply could not
find a good speed in the available SATA options.”
Over the course of a year, Walter and his team had pur-
chased and tested many different brands of storage so-
lutions. Unfortunately, they were running into the same
problem: too many issues with stor-
age, especially when it came to reli-
ability. As Walter found out, “Fast
speeds are nice, but when arrays dis-
appear off the desktop or just fail for
no particular reason, all the speed in
the world doesn’t matter.”
While Biscardi was testing new SAS/
SATA arrays, he noticed MaxxDigital
provided the ATTO ExpressSAS R380
RAID Adapter as part of the direct
attached solution for high-performance
parity protection. “In the past, I had
used ATTO Host Adapters for SCSI arrays, so I was fa-
miliar with the company.” During testing, Biscardi ran
their arrays at RAID 5 to get some good protection with-
out sacrificing too much speed.
“We found that the ATTO ExpressSAS R380 contributed
to speeds of almost double of what was provided by a
competitor’s product. By using the R380 RAID adapter
to directly connect the Maxx SATA RaidPro 8TB array,
we are able to obtain Write speeds of 488MB/sec. and
Read speeds of 429MB/sec. in a RAID 5 configuration
using a 4-Gb
file and
1920x1080
10-Bit RGB
frame size.
In addition,
ATTO’s cus-
tomer sup-
port actively
assisted us
throughout
our testing process. It was very smooth and easy to set
up the card and to make sure we got the highest speed
possible for both uncompressed and compressed HD
editing,” says Biscardi.
The R380 helped them achieve their solution because,
according to Biscardi, it was “the best combination of
speed and protection in RAID 5
mode.”
“The marriage of the Maxx RaidPro
8TB array with the ATTO ExpressSAS
R380 offers editors the ability to
achieve multiple streams of uncom-
press HD video with RAID 5 protec-
tion. And, the stability and unbeliev-
able performance achieved with this
solution comes at an extraordinarily
inexpensive cost.” states Ron Amborn
of Maxx Digital.
“We found that the ATTO ExpressSAS
R380 contributed to speeds of almost double
of what was provided by a competitor’s prod-
uct. In addition, ATTO’s customer support
actively assisted us throughout our testing
process. It was very smooth and easy to set
up the card and to make sure we got the high-
est speed possible for both uncompressed
and compressed HD editing,” states Walter
Biscardi, owner of Biscardi Creative Media.
