Pixit Media
Customer Defined Storage Solutions

For media and entertainment companies, their daily grind entails capturing, creating, and delivering digital content, on budget and on time. While these enterprises are exploding with media content and metadata, they are faced with the predicament of architecting extremely scalable and high performance storage infrastructures. Thanks to Pixit Media, a plethora of movie, television and internet media production and delivery organizations can now embrace a robust infrastructure that caters to their storage and networking needs with a minimum of management and maintenance. The company brings to the table extensive media expertise blended with differentiated software innovations and open and mature IT infrastructure components. “Putting customer requirements, environment and workflow functionalities within business requirements is at the heart of what we do,” says Ben Leaver, CEO of Pixit Media.

Pixit Media’s product, PixStor, harnesses the power of a parallel file system, providing high performance and limitless scale to deliver the quality of service and capacity needed for ultra-high-resolution film and video production. PixStor features an easy to use Application Programming Interface, (API), which can be used to build tools that integrate with both the workflow and the application of the customer’s environment. Post production and VFX organizations don’t need to understand the language of the file system to be able to integrate their tools and workflow directly into the file system. PixStor’s PixCache capability can intelligently move data, both within and between facilities, allowing users to collaborate with other divisions in dispersed locations. PixCache also enables customers to burst into the cloud seamlessly, wherein the data is automatically moved and retrieved, without the users even feeling that they are bursting into the cloud for compute. There is also an extremely powerful policy engine which enables artists and engineers to seamlessly move data based on policy within that workflow.

Pixit also offers their state-of-the-art hierarchical storage management product, PixStor HSM, which enables users to move data to lower cost tape, object, and cloud tiers while retaining a single view and the ability to quickly relay data back to the users seamlessly. Another tool on offer is PixStor Search, an in-house search engine, where users can interrogate and search against metadata which is automatically put into the file system integrated with applications using APIs. PixStor also includes advanced monitoring and analytics with real time performance, history and trending; designed for the needs of media and entertainment.

With intense focus on the successful implementation of their solutions, there is a strong philosophy of offering a unique and comprehensive approach to service and support “disk to desktop” for Pixit. For most storage and network vendors, involvement stops at the point of implementation—Pixit supports the whole environment and gets involved with them, all the way down to the application, the OS and the network, which is what translates to that “disk to desktop” concept. “It’s so unique, it initially confuses many of our prospects and reseller partners, as they have never seen anything like it” says Ben. “But it is critical for our customers’ long-term success”.

Putting customer requirements, environment and workflow functionalities within business requirements is at the heart of what we do

In the last six months, Pixit has embarked on an expansion into the US and Canada markets. Coming out from an R&D phase, Pixit Media has the core of their software components, and their focus now is on working with customers to help them attain what they’d need.