Spent part of the day today at BVE, lots and lots of cameras and blue/green screens etc but also some stuff that i was interested in. Not that that stuff isn't interesting just I'm an audio guy so other than looking at the content that that camera produces I don't have much interest at all.
With that in mind, there were some audio based companies there. The Sennheiser's on the world but the show (or maybe the UK) is not big enough to warrant any announcements so most of the stuff that they had n show was released at NAMM and therefore have read about on the interweb in some level of depth. Good to see some of those products in the flesh though. TASCAM's new recorders do look nice and even the 8 channel could be small enough for guerilla recording operations.
Interesting things from my perspective were within the data management, storage and archiving fields. The industry has heavily moved from tape based workflows to file-based in the last few years and as such a wide variety of solutions are now available.
First company I came to are called Atempo they have a very nice iTunes like interface for managing file 'vaults'. Well worth a look if you are needing something of that ilk. Gave my details and looking forward to further contact.
Next up were Object Matrix a similar setup to someone like Isilon sytems in that they deal with clusters of disks. A system starts with a 3 box minimum, smallest box being 9TB and provides failover data storage complete with metadata manipulation and searching. From what I remember they create a data object around each file that can then be tagged appropriately, neatly getting around the problem of you can't tag a WAV file with that data. 6U installation that provides about 65TB of storage for less than a sports car. That's pretty impressive.
Last company in this field worth writing anything about were Global Distribution. They appear to be a multi company distributor but to be honest whatever they are the product range they supply is impressive. From the High Performance computing (read SAN for Media purposes) of the DirectData Networks systems that can write at a rate of 2GB/s (that's half a DVD's worth of data per second) to their more appropriate for us Infinity archive solution, they have their bases covered.
The Infinity system starts with 20TB of Disk 'cache' storage and 20TB of Tape (LTO4) storage and builds to as much as you can afford (I think). All presenting itself to the user as either 1 massive storage area or various vaults.
For our purposes keeping our major projects (and their associated recorded libraries) on a nearline disk cache whilst being able to call the smaller projects assets back from a LTO is very appealing. Also LTO tapes are tiny 800GB on a tape that is about the size of 2 MiniDiscs on top of another. That's smart.
Worth while visit. Got to meet up with some people haven't seen in a while which is always nice too. The very helpful, efficient bunch at Square Group, CW Pro and their 3D belly dancers.