Zadara storage at Cine Gear Expo: Digital Media Storage Without Compromise
– Noam Shendar, VP Business Development
This week I’ll be attending the Cine Gear Expo at the legendary Paramount Studios in Hollywood. In fact, our booth will be located right on New York Street – probably one of the coolest and most famous sets in the studio!
If you’re not familiar with this event, Cine Gear Expo is the premier Film, Video, and Digital Media Expo for the entertainment industry, the largest and most important event of its kind in the United States, and internationally recognized and attended – this will be its 18th year.
What’s unique about this event is that Cine Gear was created by professionals for professionals, and focuses on the needs of the film community, attracting specialists from all the major departments of the entertainment production and post production world.
The current state of storage in the media industry
So let’s talk storage and the current state of storage in broadcast media and entertainment industries. On one hand there is a rapid transition to high definition (HD) and ultra high definition (UHD) digital environments with new, even higher resolution formats for music, video and film production. For us on the consumer end, we are accustomed to consume film and video content online through streaming services. But on the production end of things, the film and television industries have been far behind in capitalizing on cloud technology.
So why is that?
The film industry relies on massive storage capabilities and highly scalable storage solutions. As a recent Creator’s Project article calculated: ‘The Newest Godzilla Would Have Taken 450 Years To Design On A Single Computer’ – the storage and compute requirements for rich media are plenty.
The problem is that high performance, security and full featured storage are not attributes usually associated with the cloud, and honestly there’s good reason why. The first is the fact that, largely, cloud storage is based on object storage – storage that can only accommodate static files (can you imagine having to upload an entire video if you wanted to change just a single frame, or for that matter one little pixel?). Editing, compositing, effects – these are parts of the production cycle where media files change frequently and object storage is simply not an option.
Additionally, most cloud storage solutions simply cannot deliver performance that is as consistent and high as traditional NAS and SAN arrays. With pressing deadlines and multimillion dollar budgets, no one can risk or has time to waste on ‘noisy neighbors’ and degraded performance due to other users sharing the same resources. Which brings up another point: shared resources. Shared resources mean less control over where the data resides, and hence less security. Can you imagine the next Batman film dailies sitting on a shared drive with someone’s iTunes library, or another studio production?
Lastly, the massive capacity and large file sizes of rich media require tremendous bandwidth, and are a true challenge for film IT when thinking of transferring projects to, and among, remote locations. With render farms reaching petabyte scale, I dread thinking about how long it would take to transfer files using a standard uplink rate of 1TB/day….
Why does the film industry even need the cloud?
Like in other industries, the cloud can offer the media and entertainment new agility, efficiency and flexibility which delivers easier management, lower costs and new production and business opportunities. With growing file sizes and rapidly increasing resolutions, media data centers are growing at a rapid pace. And just like their enterprise data centers counterparts, they too need to plan for peak production time, meaning that they are over-investing in expensive hardware that often sits idle, eating up IT budgets and requiring power, cooling, maintenance and a staff.
With the cloud serving as a platform for delivery, the possibilities for film distribution are exciting. As examples, organizations can use the cloud for ingesting dailies, sharing file access among multiple VFX teams, or delivering diverse files sizes, formats and versions across the globe, just in time and according to need.
Flexible, Affordable, Private Media Storage as a Service (or in other words – cloud storage for media)
Last year, we teamed up with Huawei Enterprise USA to deliver a new form of digital media storage that is delivered as a service and makes a significant impact on media organizations’ ability to benefit from the best of both traditional and cloud storage. That means storage with great flexibility and without compromise. That’s important enough to repeat: without compromise!
Huawei Zadara Digital Media Storage is designed especially for the Digital Media industry (for Ingest, Dailies, Editing, Rendering, VFX, Encoding, Backup, and Archival), delivering robust SAN and NAS storage capable of delivering many simultaneous streams. And it gets even better, as they are metered by the hour and can be consumed with no commitment. Literally 100s of terabytes by the hour, there and ready when you need it, and ready to be returned when you’re done.
That means production studios can have access to robust file and block storage, using both magnetic and flash-based drives, that can grow and shrink in capacity and performance on demand, by the hour, with unprecedented scale, reliability, flexibility and data protection designed especially for applications requiring variable amounts of storage and absolute privacy. Studios can finally benefit from the cloud’s flexibility, elasticity and ease of management as primary storage, secondary storage or a hybrid supplement in our location at CoreSite’s Los Angeles One Wilshire and 900 Alameda data centers.
Zadara Storage at Cine Gear Expo
I’ll be on the studio streets of “New York” this week in Hollywood, at the Cine Gear Expo demoing the Huawei Zadara Digital Media Storage solution. If you’d like to set up a time to meet – please contact me here. You can download a solution brief here and register for a 14 day free trial where you can test our solution with your most demanding workload!
Please visit ZadaraStorage.com for more information and I look forward to seeing you at the show!
