Avid Nexis 2023.12

Now Better Supporting Pro Tools Workflows

Avid has announced a software update for their Avid Nexis family of high performance shared storage solutions. Avid Nexis 2023.12 is an update for both Nexis Client and Nexis hardware, which includes significant performance improvements for integration with Avid Pro Tools systems.

The improvements were initially designed with the Avid Nexis F2 SSD in mind, and whilst that’s where we see the biggest gains, the changes made also increase the performance of the spinning disk based Avid Nexis systems such as the F2 & F5. Both the Audio and Storage teams at Avid have really focused on not just improving the performance, but also better documenting and quantifying the storage performance when working with Avid Pro Tools, now specifying a number of voices (mono audio tracks) per media pack rather than the Pro Tools System and track count combination which was previously used and harder to interpret when applying it to different client use cases and requirements.

A single media pack of ten SSD drives on an Avid Nexis F2 SSD can deliver up to 5,000 voices at 24-bit 48kHz PCM Audio. That could be comfortably running two Pro Tools systems each running full 2048 voice count, ten systems running 500 voices each, 50 systems running 100 voices, which means it’s much more straightforward to qualify what would be required for a given amount of Pro Tools Systems and track count. Where more than 5,000 voices are required, additional media packs can be added, and performance scales linearly. This means that a single 2U Avid Nexis F2 SSD with two media packs installed would deliver up to 10,000 voices thanks to this software update, SSD performance, and a 100Gbps connection!

In comparison to the SSD based media packs, Avid Nexis E2/F2/E5/F5 can deliver up to 500 voices per media pack of ten HDD drives. There is additional benchmarking going on regarding mixed video and audio workspaces, as well as a range of tools to help further enable existing Nexis deployments to include some or all of your Pro Tools systems.

Should you wish to learn more about Avid Shared Storage solutions, give us a call on 02070256026 or contact us via e-mail [email protected] – we also have a demo Avid Nexis F2 SSD system currently installed at our Scrub W1 demo facility.