Manchester post-production facility Sumners is starting the process of consolidating its central storage with the installation of a 32 terabyte Avid Unity Isis Storage Area Network (SAN).

The new kit, which will be hooked up to 26 edit station clients, will help Sumners to accommodate the increasing amount of HD broadcast material it is dealing with.

Sumners’ director of technology Brian Hardman said: “It’s a significant step forward and perfectly complements our roadmap for the future. We’ve replaced an existing LANshare with Unity Isis and we plan to gradually introduce the new technology into our workflow, eventually replacing our two remaining SANs with further ISIS storage.”

The first project to use the new infrastructure will be HD post work on the latest 20 x 60-min series of Waterloo Road, the Shed produced drama for BBC1.

Technical support for the Unity Isis will come from reseller Root6 who also supplied the kit.

Sumners worked closely with BBC R&D to trial the Ingex file-based post-production workflow on the BBC show Dragons’ Den (pictured).

The Ingex system is used to capture five live feeds from the Den at both offline and online quality. The Sumners team then project manage the whole file based post production that only sees a tape at delivery stage.

The Isis will help to accelerate this file-based post service still further.

Sumners has 35 edit suites, Avid Symphony HD & SD finishing suites, Pro Tools dubbing theatres, Da Vinci HD grading and HD graphics.