SAN Solutions, a leading architect of enterprise-class network storage infrastructures for the media and entertainment markets, is showcasing its new Partial File Restore Engine (PFRE) this week during the 2009 NAB Show. The PFRE leverages centrally stored metadata to simplify the identification and extraction of specific footage from archives, in turn giving content owners significantly faster and more convenient access to content in the appropriate format required for production or distribution.

“In fast-paced production environments, it is critical that archive owners or users can grab just the content they want, quickly and in the right format,” said Harry Aine, president of SAN Solutions. “When the 30-second segment the user needs is in the middle of a two-hour clip, our PFRE enables the download of just the content required, thus enabling faster production of timely program content. With powerful functionality that complements this partial file restore capability, the PFRE significantly streamlines access to and movement of media within a storage system.”

The PFRE can be configured to incorporate multiple “workers” that perform tasks such as partial file restore (PFR), media transformation, data moving, and migration across the archive. With this scalability, the system can accommodate large PFR requests and a large number of requests served to extremely large archive systems. To deliver just the material required, the PFRE uses its data mover to take just a snippet of the original archived file and deliver it in the same wrapper and format, either as a new asset within the archives or as a file in an external directory. As new formats and wrappers are introduced, the PFRE system can be extended through the addition of associated transformation “workers.”

SAN Solutions’ PFRE also builds on the value of the company’s new Crawler media verification engine to provide migration and maintenance functionality. Using data acquired by Crawler scans to detect impending failure of the storage infrastructure, the PFRE – if so configured – can perform automated migration of files to a new storage subsystem, even transforming those files as needed. Full reporting and auditing capabilities enable managers to capture statistics on requests made, snippets retrieved, execution time, and other factors that feed into internal performance monitoring, as well as internal and external quotes and billing.

More information about the new PFRE is available at www.sansolutions.com, or by visiting SAN Solutions at the 2009 NAB Show, booth SL10105.