Introducing Appear Media Storage

appear media storage

The fresh approach to software-defined media storage

Providing numerous live OTT services with start-over and deep catch-up can put a strain on any storage system. The task of receiving live multiscreen ingest and on-demand media from other sources, while serving thousands of different video streams, can be demanding. It is extremely important to correctly manage the internal dynamics between packager, storage and players.

The challenge with this task becomes obvious when your storage solution decides to run a maintenance job in the middle of prime-time, or prioritizes fetching media for packaging rather than ingesting your live streams.

Seeing that our customers were solving this puzzle through adding more expensive NAS nodes, switching to all-flash storage or expensive cache solutions, we decided to do something about it. We set out to make a storage solution with task-aware prioritization and prefetch caching, offering excellent performance on mechanical HDDs, tiered archiving support, replica-based redundancy and zero-impact maintenance. And as you expect from us: The integrated solution takes less rack space, saves on power and cooling, and costs less to install, operate and maintain than alternative solutions.

The result is our own software-defined storage solution; a love child of converged infrastructure and live OTT with deep catch-up. We call it the Appear Media Storage. It is available now, and it lives straight on your existing ABR packager and origin nodes on COTS hardware, and works alongside your S3-compatible storage.

About Appear:

Appear, based in Oslo, Norway, is dedicated to designing and producing world class equipment and solutions for the delivery of professional video services. The company’s mission is to deliver unique products that open up new opportunities for video distribution. We work closely with our customers to ensure that we are at the forefront of technology and at the same time offer user friendly products.