including: integration with a wide range of partner solutions and storage devices; business storage rules; partial file restore; and SGL’s new sophisticated Infinity user interface.
SGL will also be highlighting FlashNet Infinity on its booth at NAB Show NY. Providing broadcasters and content owners with an elegant dashboard that simplifies the management of media archives, Infinity delivers a sophisticated toolset for archive and restore functionality, system health, monitoring, analysis and more. It is available as a free upgrade to all SGL FlashNet users covered by a current support contract who are running FlashNet 6.6 or later.
FlashNet Infinity takes a novel approach to the management of archived assets. While FlashNet itself is optimised for enterprise-level archiving, with the capability for automatic fail-over and for distributed processing of very high levels of activity, Infinity is designed for high-performance search, monitoring and analysis. To manage the sometimes conflicting objectives of very efficient throughput and equally efficient data analysis, the processing and database demands of FlashNet and Infinity are managed separately. Two separate but connected SQL Server databases store FlashNet’s transactional information and Infinity’s metadata and summary data. The two databases can be run on the same or separate servers, depending on requirements.
Infinity is a web-based framework that runs dashboards containing one or more gadgets. Each gadget offers a tool, which for convenience SGL groups into searching, monitoring, analysing and system administration categories. While some dashboards are pre-configured by SGL as system-defined, others can be created by the organisation or by the individual user by dragging and dropping gadgets. All dashboards can be modified to fit the organisation, depending on the access rights of a specific user.
There are several benefits to this approach. First, Infinity can be configured to work exactly as needed by the particular organisation or user. Secondly, SGL can easily roll out additional gadgets to FlashNet customers over time, with each site determining how they will introduce them. A third benefit of this technology framework is that each gadget can be embedded within the user interfaces of SGL’s partners’ solutions.
SGL’s FlashNet is the result of over 20 years of leading-edge content archive software development. Regardless of the size or environment, FlashNet’s clustered architecture and open approach provides secure, futureproof business solutions that grow with the customer. SGL continues to work in collaboration with the other major vendors in the broadcast industry to provide its customers with industry-leading archive management solutions utilising the latest technological advances. As workflows utilise the cloud more fully, as new standards emerge, as disaster recovery models become more sophisticated, SGL’s FlashNet will continue to stay at the forefront of innovation.
Lee Sheppard joined SGL as Director of Product Management in February 2014. His career, which spans more than 25 years, includes founding and leading BSS (Broadcast Systems Software) Ltd., the company that created Broadcast Master, a mission-critical planning and scheduling system still used by TV stations throughout the world today. Following the company’s acquisition he continued to lead the same product and team as part of a Fortune-500 company. He also spent 15 years as Senior Product Line Manager at Harris Corporation and Harris Broadcast, leading the strategic design, direction and delivery of the Broadcast Master product suite.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
LEE SHEPPARD