Background
Omneon Video Networks develops and markets an advanced media server system that consists of specialized hardware and software components connected by various networking technologies. Omneon deploys a building block approach in the design of its servers. This approach ensures that a system will exactly match a customers needs in terms of real-time channel count, media format types, IP connectivity, storage capacity, overall bandwidth and redundancy.

Customers can purchase only what they need initially, confident that they can add capacity and formats as their needs grow. This building block approach is not only applied to the physical hardware, but also encompasses the system software. This paper describes the individual components and how they relate to one another.

System Hardware Components
An Omneon Spectrum media server is comprised of 3 main hardware components: MediaPorts/ MultiPorts, which are the physical media I/O devices; MediaServers, which manage access to the hard drives, along with providing IP based connectivity; and MediaStores, which are the disk subsystems onto which data is stored. The most basic Omneon server is comprised of one of each of these, but the system can be expanded up to dozens of channels, and many Terabytes of storage, simply by adding more “blocks” to the system.

Interconnection between the MediaPorts/MultiPorts and the MediaServers is via an industry standard High Speed Serial Bus, and interconnection between the MediaServers and the MediaStores is via Multiple 2Gb/s Fibre Channel loops.