NAB 2012 was Cache-A’s fourth appearance at our industry’s seminal media and entertainment trade show. This recent opportunity to strut our stuff in Las Vegas will certainly be remembered as our best yet. As we experienced last year, from the Monday morning opening through the Thursday afternoon closing bell, our booth was busy with potential customers, partners, current users, press, and all kinds of attendees just wanting to learn about archiving. And this year, we note a number of real milestones marking our success.
More than anything, we saw this year’s show as a milestone for broad recognition that archiving content is a need that can no longer be ignored. While video tape has been on the way out for many, many years now, it seemed that most media professionals were in denial about how they were going to preserve their digital media assets for the future. No longer. With the growth in the popularity of our products complemented by the emergence of LTFS as a new open standard, we are seeing both a big increase in activity in this space and an even bigger increase in user awareness that LTO archiving is the solution for preservation going forward. I even heard one attendee state that “3D was the topic for NAB last year; archiving is the key topic for this year.”
This year’s show was also a milestone for Cache-A to be able to address the need of users with larger volumes of content needing bigger bandwidths and faster archiving. This show was the debut of Power-Cache as a shipping product; we can now step up to the plate with 10 GbE connectivity and up to 4 tape drive concurrent archiving from a single appliance. We’ve been a great solution for small and medium production and post production needs with our Prime-Cache and Pro-Cache product lines since our inception, but now we can move enough data to be of real interest to a whole new group of customers.
In recognition that Power-Cache represents a new level of performance, Cache-A was very pleased to be honored by StudioDaily as the Winner of Best New Post Production Product for User Interface/User Experience. Editor-in-chief Beth Marchant quoted one judge as saying “this thing is rock-solid, it just works” as she made the presentation at their awards ceremony that I had the pleasure to be present to receive. This citation marks another milestone that we will treasure for years to come.
Another milestone that I would like to note is the fulfillment of a long-time request that we’ve heard since we introduced our first products – customers asking “can I mount my SAN directly on your appliance?” 
Well, now you can. Announced at this show, we have been working with Facilis, Archion, and Studio Network Solutions (featured working in our booth) as well as are in the process of validating StorNext to offer high speed, direct mount solutions. This will allow customers to move their content directly between their spinning disk and their Cache-A archive providing convenient and speedy relief for those always over-filled shared arrays. Check our news page to read more about this exciting development.
Along with our increasing partnerships with SAN and NAS makers, adding to our existing editing, asset management, automation, and other hardware and software makers, this show was also a milestone in our participation in other partners’ booths. As in previous years, we were honored to be included in the Panasonic and Square Box Solutions (CatDV) stands. This year we were also shown working in partnership with other manufacturers, including Cinedeck, Studio Network Solutions, Facilis, and last but not least, our OEM partner, HP. Additionally, we were featured at value-add reseller booths Able Cinetech, B&H Studios and Maxx Digital. It was truly gratifying to see this level of proliferation.
This really was a year of milestones, and the Cache-A team is grateful to our customers and partners for helping to make us a success. We’d like to extend a special thanks to HP for not only being a great OEM supplier, but for helping us throughout the show, with true appreciation to Vicky Blake, Penny Walker and Brian Kirby. Special thanks also go out to our representative firm, Asia Media Products, and to our U.S. distributor JB&A. And a final thanks to our guest artists Morgan Rees and Jeff Pederson. All of you helped us immeasurably, and we appreciate the confidence you’ve shown in Cache-A and assistance you’ve provided.
Creative COW’s Debra Kaufman recently interviewed Mark Ostlund, our VP of Sales & Marketing, to get a more in-depth perspective on the development of our new Power-Cache archive server; 
We don’t want you to miss the excitement of reading the original article for yourself, but here’s some background: At NAB 2011, we were honored with a 
According to a very recent article by noted storage industry expert, Tom Coughlin in Forbes magazine, the impact of the monsoon floods in Thailand will be felt by the computer supply chain for many months to come. It will likely impact the development of flash memory and magnetic tape for computer and enterprise storage applications. Greater sales of dual storage computers and greater LTO tape sales will be likely consequences going into 2012.
Overall over 80 attendees learned how to install and configure CatDV, and to use CatDV with Cache-A systems. Their software has been an up-and-coming asset management solution in its own right. Now that Apple is no longer offering Final Cut Server, this has become the DAM solution of choice for Final Cut Pro users. It also works well with Premier and Media Composer as well as mixed environments.
Expanding our trade show efforts this year, Cache-A is exhibiting at Broadcast India 2011 at the Bombay Exhibition Centre, Goregaon (E), Mumbai, India, today through October 22. We are in the Genesis Forte Tech Pvt. Ltd. booth (E505).