Avid NEXIS F-Series – a welcome evolution

This week sees Avid announcing the latest in its NEXIS product range and for those that have lived the Unity to ISIS, ISIS to NEXIS transitions you’ll be pleased to hear that the NEXIS F-Series addition is an evolution not a revolution to the product line.  

A graceful, transparent addition rather than a heavily caveated qualification nightmare.

Why have Avid introduced the NEXIS F-Series now?

Simply, the world as we know it is going through manufacturing challenges and Avid are not immune to these. So, they have cleverly taken the opportunity to introduce some improvements they have been wanting to do for some time while moving to the new Seagate chassis.

These include increased: 

  • User and file count 
  • Chassis bandwidth and NIC performance improvements (600MB/S) and NIC performance improvements (10/25GbE for F2 and 25/50Gbe for F5) 
  • NEXIS file system subscription

The first thing all NEXIS Pro and NEXIS E-Series users will be worried about is the compatibility with their existing infrastructure. This is where we support our comment above about it being a transparent addition. The NEXIS F-Series chassis can be seamlessly integrated into an E-Series setup.

However, there are a couple of caveats to be aware of are: 

  • Controllers in F-Series are different to that in the E-Series. This only affects those facilities that hold spares. 
  • Speeds in an E-Series and F-Series system will be limited to the 400Mb/s of the E-Series. You will need to separate the F-Series chassis as its own storage group if you want to take advantage of the bandwidth improvements.  
  • If you add an SDA+ to benefit from higher file count then a migration of the data set is required.  

 What else do you need to know? 

  • NEXIS Pro is replaced with the NEXIS Pro+ 
  • NEXIS E2 is replaced with the F2 
  • NEXIS E4 is replaced with the F2 and an expansion chassis called F2X 
  • NEXIS E5 is replaced with the F5 
  • NEXIS E5NL replaced with the F5NL  
  • NEXIS SDA is replaced with the SDA+ 

One last thing to note is the NEXIS E-Series is no longer available but the NEXIS F-Series is shipping now.  

Want to know more about Avid NEXIS Subscription or Avid NEXIS F-Series or place an order? 

Contact us on sales@tyrellcct.com, 0207 148 6200 or +353 (1) 888 1118.