For Media & Entertainment, getting all the raw camera footage from on-set dailies into the pipeline to be transcoded, reviewed, archived and delivered as quickly as possible is an ongoing balancing act for solution stacks. The higher the frame size, frame rate and footage definition, the more data there is to shift.

Media & Entertainment has widely embraced commodity IT technologies, such as cloud and Ethernet, to do these processes. However, Storage Area Network or SAN is still trusted to deliver real-time playback across many disciplines, workflows and pipelines. It is a widely held assumption that as formats and data-rates become ever higher, a SAN is needed.

This whitepaper will explore the ‘why’ behind this trust, and how the introduction of new technologies, such as NVMe over Fabrics or NVMe-oF, can help us understand how we can challenge this assumption in an informed and meaningful way.