Continued engineering delivers up to two-thirds lower cost per channel on compressed workflows, protecting customers from rising server memory prices
TAG Video Systems, the global leader in software-based IP monitoring and multiviewer solutions, today announced a memory usage optimization that lowers the total cost of ownership of running its software, reducing the cost per channel by up to two-thirds for compressed workflows.
From day one, TAG’s hardware strategy has had a single objective: to give customers the lowest possible total cost per channel. For compressed workflows, that has historically been achieved by pairing mid-range servers with maximum memory, a configuration TAG benchmarked and certified for optimal price performance.
The recent global shortage of server memory, and the astronomical rise in its price, changed that equation. With memory now taking a disproportionate share of server cost, TAG’s R&D team revisited its optimization calculations and developed an alternative approach that dramatically reduces the amount of memory each server requires while preserving the quality customers depend on. By running a server on as few as four memory modules, rather than a fully populated configuration, TAG delivers comparable monitoring capability at a substantially lower cost per channel.
For compressed workflows, the trade is heavily in the customer’s favor: cost per channel falls by up to 66 percent, while server capacity drops by only around 20 percent. TAG has now extended the same approach to uncompressed ST 2110 environments, where benchmarking on certified platforms is complete. The memory savings there are equally significant, with a larger capacity trade-off of up to around 50 percent in some configurations, giving customers a new option to weigh against their specific balance of inputs and outputs.
“Our commitment has always been to optimize our customers’ investment in hardware, not just to keep pace with it,” said Stas Bangiev, VP R&D at TAG Video Systems. “When memory prices rose across the industry, we didn’t ask our customers to simply absorb the increase. We went back to the drawing board and engineered a way to deliver the same quality for dramatically less, because reducing our customers’ costs is central to how we operate.”
This memory usage optimization is available in the latest release of TAG’s MCM software, with further platform work already under way. TAG innovation is delivered as part of the Zero Friction® subscription- customers receive this optimization, and every improvement that follows, as part of their plan at no extra cost. Customers are encouraged to contact their TAG representative to confirm the optimal configuration for their environment.
FAQs
High-density hardware lowers total cost of ownership by reducing the number of servers a workload needs, which cuts both purchase cost and ongoing power and cooling. With NVIDIA ConnectX-7 now qualified, a single 1RU TAG node handles up to 800 Gbps of ST 2110 and JPEG XS flows. TAG’s memory optimization works on the other side of the equation, lowering cost per server so cost per channel falls even when a deployment needs an extra box.
Software-based monitoring runs on standard compute, so broadcast teams can deploy it on premises or in the cloud and share servers with other IT workloads. With version 7, TAG’s MCM deploys in containers. That lets facilities spin resources down when productions end and apply the endpoint security and patch schedules IT departments now expect. Hardware costs still matter, which is why TAG engineers its software to do the same work with less memory.
