ERA appointed as a Mellanox Partner Preferred Reseller for Broadcast and Media

We are proud to announce the appointment of ERA as a Mellanox Partner Preferred reseller for broadcast and media. As a solution provider with many years of real world application experience ERA now adds the full portfolio of Mellanox products including Ethernet and InfiniBand adapter cards, network switches, cables, software and services.

Mellanox is a leading provider of high-throughput, low latency server and storage interconnects. They have a wide range of solutions that operate at up to EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and up to 100GbE Ethernet. These solutions have been optimised to reduce application wait time for data whilst dramatically increasing your ROI for your datacentres.

The broadcast and media market has been evolving to use higher resolution video and this is having a dramatic impact on studio infrastructures particularly around the network interconnect.   Moving to Ultra HD, 4K-Full and even 8K formats – with higher colour depths and 3D video – results in data streams that are orders of magnitude bigger than before. Animation and CGI (computer-generated imagery) require render farms with vast compute power that devour network bandwidth.  This has created a major challenge for studios and post-production houses as 1Gb Ethernet, 8Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet interconnects struggle to handle these types of workload.

Mellanox offers an end-to-end interconnect solution that delivers high bandwidth, low latency whilst allowing you to scale to multiple streams of UltraHD video per link and run multiple production flows simultaneously. RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) allows even lower latency and higher throughput and is built into multiple storage protocols and file systems, including iSER (iSCSI with RDMA), SMB Direct, Pixit, Quantum StorNext and Isilon.  Mellanox Virtual Protocol Interconnect® (VPI) switches have the unique ability to support both Ethernet and InfiniBand at 10Gb/s, 40Gb/s, and 56Gb/s data rates per port, along with the ability to mix Ethernet and InfiniBand ports on the same switch. They feature the lowest latency, highest density and lowest jitter in the industry, ensuring smooth video ingestions, editing and playback even with uncompressed 4K and 8K video.  You get investment protection with the ability to start at 10Gb/s and upgrade some or all your interconnects to 40Gb/s or 56Gb/s speeds as needed. Aggressive pricing allows you to handle higher resolutions, faster frame rates for sports and action video and more streams at a lower TCO.

“Mellanox have a complete range of products and with our systems and infrastructure experience will allow our clients to benefit from the latest networking technologies from a market leading and established manufacturer” said Sean Baker, ERA’ Commercial Director.

Richard Hastie, Mellanox’s Senior Business Development Director for Media and Entertainment says, “With ERA’s strong reputation in broadcast and media they bring a vast level of experience and knowledge to bear on the market.  Their mix of systems skills and industry proven success will continue to strengthen the presence of Mellanox solutions into the ever changing digital media domain.”