By Randi Altman

There have never been as many options for professional M&E storage needs as there are currently, whether they are on-prem, in the cloud, or a combination of both. Often those options are being used for different purposes depending on the workflow, such as offline, visual effects, finishing, etc. Users are finding it helpful to mix the types of storage they use day to day, including SAN, NAS, scale-out NAS, private and public cloud and more.

A big trend noted by many of the storage makers and storage users interviewed for this story, is the need for remote access for distributed workforces, which means more are relying on the cloud.

Let’s find out more from our roundatble…

Whitehouse Post/Carbon’s Jeff Drury

Whitehouse Post and sister company Carbon provide film editing, creative production, design, direction, visual effects and color. They are based in London, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Kansas City. Recent projects out of Carbon include spots for Verizon, Google, Sony and Adidas. Recent projects from Whitehouse Post include Nike, Pringles and Marvel.

Can you describe your company and the work you do?
My team and I support two studios with very different workflows and needs.

Whitehouse Post is a film editing company with over 30 years of experience collaborating with agencies, global brands and directors to deliver compelling content on any screen. We pride ourselves on nurturing the best talent to deliver the finest work across all our offices worldwide.

Carbon is a creative production studio made up of specialists in every discipline. We are directors, designers, CGI and VFX artists, colorists and producers. Based in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, we partner with agencies, brands and filmmakers, crafting ideas into valuable content. Our teams have managed and crafted some of the biggest campaigns of the past decade.

What sort of storage are you using? On-prem? Cloud? Hybrid?
We use a combination of storage solutions to fit the particular needs of our studios.

In the offline space, Whitehouse Post uses both centralized on-prem Avid Nexis storage as well as AWS cloud-based systems for redundancy, file sharing and data transfer.

That differs at Carbon, where our central storage systems are primarily built upon the cloud-based file system WekaFS. Our entire user base operates from a single solution that offers both the size and bandwidth required for all of our applications.  On-prem storage is only used for ingest before files get uploaded to the cloud.

Are you still also using the equivalent of sneakernet? Running drives around?
Only rarely and as necessary. Typically, once we receive the media, it either resides on our central storage systems for access remotely or is sent to the user via a fast file-transfer utility. For projects or users that require local storage, files stay with and are maintained by the individual, who sends back project changes through cloud-based file sharing applications and fast file transfer.

How are you working with storage in remote workflows?
We provide the solution that fits the user and the situation. We maintain workstations (on-prem and cloud) with direct access to our primary storage systems so that they can operate within that shared environment through remote access. If that does not fit the need, we leverage fast file transfer and sharing to allow the workstations to collaborate with centralized users.

Do you use a MAM?
Only for specific long-term projects. We do not use it to maintain day-to-day workflow.

What are some of your pain points surrounding storage?
Not many. The solutions we have chosen and implemented are a balance of cost-effective capacity and high-performance file access for the need of the particular studio, and we are more than satisfied with them.

Carbon’s cloud systems can instantly expand in both of those directions as the need requires. Whitehouse Post’s on-prem storage systems are particularly positioned to facilitate our move to the cloud as it becomes cost-effective to host offline workflows there.
Any wish lists for those who are making storage products?

File caching. Efficient and high-speed sync between intra/inter-region object stores. Consistent data access regardless of the location of the storage system or the user.

Facilis’ Jim McKenna

What do you see as the biggest trends in storage at the moment?
Remote access. Whether it be editing remotely or simply accessing internal data, this is a big problem for facilities.

Workflows that deliver files to remote desktops come in two forms: stream and sync. There are sync workflows that work well but require a lot of moving parts and don’t scale well to larger environments. Streaming systems often require VPN, which causes too much latency for active editorial. Some solutions are both sync and stream, using upload to a dedicated cloud storage then streaming to the desktop. These can work well but are costly and complex and don’t offer a good hybrid (on-prem and remote) workflow story.

What types of storage does Facilis offer?
Facilis is an on-prem storage technology company, but as a part of our integrations, we offer multiple methods of remote access because no one solution is right for everyone. Our MAM (FastTracker) has remote web access, we support external access to our storage through the S3 protocol, and we offer cloud sync solutions and, most importantly, our WANLink remote mounting product, which offers the same storage access as an on-prem network — with the same permissions and accounts and without the need for any VPN.

WANLink is perfect for hybrid or part-time remote workflows when simple RDP (remote desktop protocol) solutions don’t work.

Who typically uses your storage?
Our customers include some of the biggest networks and studios, like NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures and Disney; full-service production companies like BrandStar, Warm Springs and Mills James; and corporate video departments at Nvidia, Intel and Ferguson Enterprises, just to name a few.

If working in the cloud, what are your egress costs? Is that built into the cost of your product?
We offer cloud products that have no egress fees. Any other cloud storage our customers use is managed by the customer, so we don’t get into the situation of having to bill for overages due to egress or access.

What about remote storage. How are you making that workflow stronger/more secure?
We provide remote editorial product transport/socket encryption and authentication using industry-standard encryption, mode and message authentication algorithms. While using Facilis, the storage mounted to your desktop at home is just as secure.

Do you see ransomware as a big concern for your users? What system do you have in place?
Ransomware requires full access to the data in the file system. Using our Smart Access Rules, we can lock down critical data in our file systems to avoid these vulnerabilities while the storage is mounted to a client workstation. Our access rules secure data while allowing creative people to work within their projects.

You mentioned your MAM solution earlier. Can you describe?
Our FastTracker MAM is gaining popularity within the content creation world for its simplicity of operation, feature set and support. The full version is included with our server product and includes proxy generation, local transcription service and archive automation in conjunction with our Object LTO and Object Cloud products. We’ve been offering simple and affordable data integrity through integrated backup and archive for years.

Apache’s LaRue Anderson

Apache is a Dolby-certified color and finishing house for TV, film, advertising and streaming content. Founded in 2014 in Santa Monica, Apache works with HBO, Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, Amazon and other clients on projects such as McCartney 3, 2, 1; Neymar The Perfect Chaos; and Say Hey, Willie Mays! 

What sort of storage are you using? On-prem? Cloud? Hybrid? 
In-house networked RAIDS, SAN and local drives.

How are you working with storage in remote workflows?
We love Masv and use it daily. Masv’s cloud-based LFT technology has also helped when transferring to remote staff, clients or partners because it’s just as easy to send files to remote locations as it is across the office.

We often transfer full episodes of truly gargantuan sizes — typically between 1.5 and 3.5TB. Because Apache often works with raw media from cinematic cameras by ARRI, Red and Blackmagic, our staff is accustomed to working with big files ranging from 200GB to a full terabyte. Apache typically uses SAS and EXR codecs on 4K, 6K or 8K footage.

Where are some of your pain points surrounding storage?
I meet with the local chapter of Green The Bid to discuss and create best practices for post. One of the things that really made me want to get involved and make a change is when I read this on the Green The Bid website: “Storing data online or in ‘the cloud’ is just putting it in data centers. Statistics show that 3% of global electricity is consumed by the world’s 8 million data centers, and they in turn are accountable for over 1% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To give you a comparison, global shipping accounts for around 2.5% of GHG emissions and aviation is 3%. From Green The Bid’s research, we estimate that one project of 10TBs, stored online for five years, creates nine tons (9,000kg) of CO2.”

This information was shocking to me as cloud-based storage solutions are presenting as more eco-friendly. I feel like there has to be a middle ground.

Any wish lists for those who are making storage products?
A best practice would be two copies on LTO tapes for final archive and done. I understand the want to keep footage forever. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent for production. People get attached. But what value does it really have other than what we have attached to it with our own emotions?

Has anyone ever gone back to the 1989 Pepsi commercial film scans and rescanned it for a commercial today? The answer is probably not. We would rip the footage from somewhere and up-rez the digital files, running it through a program to find dead pixels and scratches. We’d match or reshoot or recreate. Holding onto files forever is an emotional thing that I feel we should start to move away from after a certain period of time.

AJA Video’s Abe Abt

What do you see as the biggest trends in storage at the moment?Cloud migration is a huge trend we’re seeing in storage right now across M&E and other verticals, especially considering the move toward a more distributed workforce in recent years. As more companies enlist talent from around the world, we’re seeing a deviation from large, centralized facilities. In line with this trend, the demand for globally accessible, high-speed and secure storage is surging, and many technology service providers are fighting to provide the most innovative solutions.

Competition, however, breeds innovation, and we are seeing some very exciting offerings in cloud storage, but such rapid growth creates its own challenges when it comes to managing your data across so many different platforms. This is where a solution like our AJA Diskover Media Edition can prove beneficial.

How are your tools help those working with storage?
AJA Video Systems offers software solutions that allow customers to more efficiently manage their storage and rapidly curate their data no matter how or where it is stored. AJA Diskover Media Edition Software allows our clients to create a global index of all their data across all their storage, in the cloud and on-premises. The global index is accessible to users in real time via a simple web interface regardless of their location.

Who typically uses this software?
AJA Diskover Media Edition has been deployed at a wide variety of facilities in the M&E space, from boutique post houses to large facilities with hundreds of petabytes of cloud storage scattered across the world.

Can you talk about product cost? 
Our pricing model for AJA Diskover Media Edition is on a per-node, per-year basis. The data growth problems are a runaway problem outside of the control of our clients, and we do not want to charge them on a per-terabyte basis to manage and curate their data.

How are you making that workflow stronger/more secure?
AJA Diskover Media Edition provides users with the ultimate data security. “Visibility without accessibility” allows users to find their data, report on it and enrich it with business context metadata. It gives them a true understanding of what their data and storage are doing and can be doing for the organization — all without requiring potentially destructive access to the data.

Diskover Media Edition allows a company’s full workforce to access and report on data that would normally require multiple layers of security clearances — from anywhere on the planet. The time and financial resource savings from this empowerment are immense.

Can you talk about data recovery, backup, orchestration? 
While AJA Diskover Media Edition does not actually store data, it creates a global index of all the user’s data as a “snapshot in time” at the time of indexing. Since the index is enriched with searchable metadata, these snapshots become valuable tools for data recovery and reorganization in the event of unforeseen data loss, theft or destruction.

Are you working with NVMe? What are the benefits?
NVMe is a valuable tool in M&E, as rapid access to data is paramount to production workflows. However, high-speed storage often comes at a cost, and one of AJA Diskover Media Edition’s most valuable features is the ability it gives businesses to understand when their high-speed storage is being properly used and when it is being wasted on old data that can be archived on lower-cost, lower-speed storage.

How does your software work with MAMs?
AJA Diskover Media Edition integrates with a variety of third-party media asset management (MAM) tools. Users can take action on any file found within an AJA Diskover Media Edition Index, such as providing simple web-based media asset previews of files, sending files or groups of files off for complex transcoding, and provisioning workflows for final delivery. MAM tools with an API can work with AJA Diskover Media Edition.

Silver Sound’s Cory Choy

Silver Sound is an Emmy Award-winning boutique sound house in New York City. They have two mix rooms and two recording booths as well as location sound gear and microphones. They take production all the way from sonic preproduction and planning to location sound recording to sound editing and restoration to design to mix. 

What sort of storage are you using? On-prem? Cloud? Hybrid?
We use a hybrid of Drobo on-prem networked drives and cloud storage.

Are you still also using the equivalent of sneakernet? Running drives around?
When recording on-set, yes. We store the info on SD, CF and HDD, but we also back the sound up into the cloud.

How are you working with storage in remote workflows?
Google Drive, Vimeo and Frame.io.

Do you use a MAM?
Sometimes Vimeo and Frame.io.

Where are some of your pain points surrounding storage?
The cost of storage is really the biggest pain point. The next one is when cloud services go down and there is no local copy — this can be devastating. But local storage must be maintained constantly.

Any wish lists for those who are making storage products?
The ideal solution for me would be a cloud service that mirrors something on a physical drive automatically and makes it possible to quickly restore a drive or computer from the cloud should one need to.

Scale Logic’s Bob Herzan 

What do you see as the biggest trends in storage at the moment?
Well, there are trends, and there are buzzwords, and there is a fine line between the two. When we focus on what we’re seeing with our customers, we find that the storage industry doesn’t follow a trend. Users want fast, expandable, reliable and affordable storage, which is no different in our industry now than it was five or 10 years ago.

The difference now is there are so many choices for customers — SAN, NAS, scale-out NAS, private and public cloud and more. Choosing the right technology for the job is essential. Using multiple storage technologies and seamlessly integrating them is pivotal in achieving the goals of any media workflow.

With that said, storage trends are appearing. We are seeing people looking to accomplish myriad things, including simplifying complexity by adding data analytics, real-time cloud costing, automation and orchestration to eliminate manual tasks and optimize their investment in their storage.

Finally, the introduction of artificial intelligence will drastically change how people genuinely think about and interact with storage.

What types of storage do you offer?
Scale Logic has created WorkflowConnect to foster a more consultative approach to solving our customers’ workflow needs. It incorporates these storage technologies: single and clustered NAS; all-flash, scale-out NAS; object storage for private or active archives; and public cloud.

However, the storage is just the beginning of WorkflowConnect. Once we choose the right storage combination for the client’s needs, we add value to storage with our interoperability lab, data management tools, analytics and orchestration –– which can be purchased separately for existing legacy storage or fully packaged for greenfield opportunities.

Additionally, WorkflowConnect delivers on-prem and hybrid storage solutions for any sized media requirement.

Who typically uses your storage?
Our user base represents a wide variety that works in production, including post houses (movies, TV shows, music videos, etc.), sports and entertainment, news and broadcasting, and large corporations that require multiple tiers of storage for all kinds of workflows — so small post houses to enterprise facilities and everything in between.

If working in the cloud, what are your egress costs? Is that built into the cost of your product?
This question is a bit open-ended. Many of our customers already have cloud providers. As such, we ensure that our data movers and additional integrations support any cloud offering.

Scale Logic offers private and public cloud services that have zero egress charges. However, for those who do work with cloud providers that charge egress, we supply a software layer that can give them real-time costing of data movement to and from the cloud.

Additionally, our users can employ our solution for dry runs to compare cloud providers, ultimately enabling them to make the right choice for their business. Selecting the right cloud provider will also allow them to automate the movements and continue to track costs –– eliminating the monthly shock they get every time they receive a new cloud bill.

What about remote storage? How are you making that workflow stronger/more secure?
In the worst conditions, people can spend days on Google looking at each software or appliance that manages or supports remote storage or workflow. Our alternative gives our clients a one-stop solution with multiple options, including bidirectional sync, VDI and RDMA appliances that address any high-performance requirement. Having those tools to solve remote connectivity is a game-changer for our users — simplifying the integration and interoperability issues many customers have had since the pandemic.

Can you talk about data recovery, backup, orchestration?
For sure! We provide continuity solutions, including highly secure backup, archive and recovery to protect any digital asset. In fact, we cover the gamut — checksum, snapshots, on-site and off-site data protection and even ongoing support.

Also, creating a built-in data recovery and backup plan is mandatory when working with our users. However, educating people on how to automate processes with unique orchestration tools is hugely important to the overall ROI clients need to stay competitive in this industry.

Do you see ransomware as a big concern for your users? What system do you have in place?
Yes. Cybersecurity is something that impacts everyone — we take it very seriously. And as you know, nobody is safe from this, meaning all users need to plan accordingly for their business needs. To help, we provide built-in safeguards for ransomware, such as snapshots, second-tier replicated storage and off-site data recovery.

The reality is that everyone is painfully aware that a ransomware attack is crippling. Snapshots at a block level protect online production data sets, and those snap changes can be replicated to a destination located anywhere, giving multiple levels of protection.

Are you working with NVMe? What are the benefits?
Absolutely. Our solutions are purpose-built for high-resolution/high-performance workflows, providing high speeds paired with affordable storage capacity. Our users experience great ROI resulting from decreased production times. This ROI, in turn, translates to more jobs completed, meaning more profit to the bottom line. And once a high-performance task is completed, content can quickly move to less expensive, SAS-attached JBOD storage to maintain ongoing ROI and ease of use.

Do you also offer archive/MAM with your tools?
As part of our WorkflowConnect platform, we offer an intelligent, all-in-one media browser that includes a file browser, media file conversion tool and media player built in to a single installer. You can access your videos directly from your hard drive, SD card or Scale Logic production storage — with no ingest required. Our media browser (MAM-Lite) solution looks and feels like a simple nonlinear editor. If you have used Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Productions, Avid Media Composer or DaVinci Resolve, then our media browser is intuitive, with no learning curve.

You can then use our media Browser’s drill-down function to flatten and filter the content of the entire storage device and define media-aware filters such as frame rate and resolution to find the files you are looking for.

Our media browser provides functions like subclipping, renaming, scene detection and image gallery exports while simultaneously integrating with all the video editing apps I just mentioned.

We offer asset management, automation and orchestration tools as part of our workflow toolsets. For example, our automated ingest workflow solution includes transcoding, metadata asset tagging and archive orchestrations. Using your idle workstations to do the transcoding work instead of purchasing more hardware creates very cost-effective solutions for Media Composer, Premiere and Final Cut editorial environments.

Our asset management layer also includes an Adobe Premiere panel for Premiere users/editors.

MTI Film’s Victor Vaile

MTI Film provides post services for episodic television shows, including dailies facilitation, online editing, VFX and color correction. They also specialize in film restoration and host the MTI Remote Center for remote Avid Media Composer editing.

What sort of storage are you using? On-prem? Cloud? Hybrid?
We use spinning disk RAID and SSD storage chassis that are connected via Fibre Channel and accessed through our SAN. All of our storage is on-prem. We’re constantly evaluating the efficacy of new developments in cloud storage as they emerge, however at this time the on-prem storage suits our needs best.

Are you still also using the equivalent of sneakernet? Running drives around?
Some clients opt to deliver and take delivery of data on standalone drives or RAID chassis. Internally, we do not move independent drives around for data transfer.

How are you working with storage in remote workflows?
Remote users can connect to their workstations as required. However, all of the data remains in the facility, so our existing storage infrastructure is used in the same manner as local users.

Do you use a MAM?
We do not use an off-the-shelf MAM solution, but there are some MAM-like capabilities built in to the tools we use in-house.

Where are some of your pain points surrounding storage?
We have none. Kidding. No matter how much storage engineering can put into place, production always manages to need more.

Any wish lists for those who are making storage products?
More intelligent RAID controllers, better access to individual drive analytics, lower latency, larger capacity, higher throughput. The usual.

Dell Technologies’ Tom Burns

What do you see as the biggest trends in storage at the moment?
All-flash storage is now cost-effective at the edge, making it possible to serve high-performance, low-latency workflows to locations outside the data center. For companies that span multiple locations and regions around the world, multiple high-performance, all-flash edge deployments can be coupled together with an object-based “distributed core,” enabling geographically distributed workflows that can expand access to talent, enable 24/7 collaboration across time zones and securely protect content.

LTO-based archives can be expanded in place, creating a metadata-driven archive. LTO has played a critical role in the long-term archiving of content for decades, and many companies are looking for ways to get more value from archived content.

One way they are achieving this is by migrating to object storage, creating a long-term archive that is searchable using extended metadata. Found content can then be transitioned to higher-performance file systems for additional post or editing. For those with large tape archives, this will be a daunting task to undertake at one time, but we’ve had success in an ongoing hybrid migration model that caches content from tape storage on-demand and saves to the new object storage, creating a constantly growing, searchable metadata repository over time, rather than an “overnight” migration of assets.

Finally, “camera to cloud” for on-set workflow is maturing. Cloud usage is undergoing massive growth as cloud providers and ISVs offer more cloud-based tools and services focused on creative workflows. One trend that we’re beginning to see more and more is the use of camera-to-cloud workflows, where assets are uploaded directly from set to a cloud provider’s infrastructure for immediate access by craft editorial, VFX and studio dailies review.

What types of storage do you offer?
Dell Technologies is best known in M&E for its Dell PowerScale scale-out NAS file storage (formerly Isilon, which won the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award in 2020 for early development of hierarchical storage management systems).

We’ve continued in this spirit of innovation to gather ongoing feedback from our media and entertainment customers to make ongoing software and hardware improvements, like NVMe to support demanding workflows that require NFS over RDMA and smaller-footprint, all-flash nodes to support high-performance workflows at the edge. We also offer massively scalable object-based storage in Dell ECS and ObjectScale that can act as an affordable, metadata-searchable cold archive or as the distributed core for global workflows.

Who typically uses your storage?
Our customer base of 2,000-plus M&E customers spans a wide range of specialties and requirements. They range from small VFX houses to large multi-national broadcasters.

If working in the cloud, what are your egress costs? Is that built into the cost of your product?
Our view is that customers should have a range of options so they can make tactical cloud decisions that allow them to benefit from cloud in a way that works best for their workflows while still taking advantage of our leading storage products. To that end, Dell Technologies offers a few options for achieving “as a service” models on-premise, extending to cloud providers and native experiences on leading cloud hyperscalers.

For example, Apex Data Storage Services for File provides consumption-based pricing in either a Dell-managed or customer-managed model that can make data available to multiple cloud providers with our colocation partners.

We offer Dell PowerScale for Google Cloud, a turnkey Dell Technologies-managed solution that provides an ideal platform for deploying performance-intensive, file-based workloads natively in Google Cloud Platform.

As for making our storage software available via cloud hyperscalers, Dell Technologies previewed Project Alpine in May. Project Alpine will bring our flagship file, block and object storage software into all the major hyperscalers – AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – and bring operational consistency across environments. Project Alpine offers our storage software combined with advanced public cloud services, simplifying multi-cloud complexity by delivering a consistent experience wherever your data resides.

What about remote storage? How are you making that workflow stronger/more secure?
As M&E workgroups adopt the workflows and infrastructure of the data center, all storage becomes remote, but we turn an ever more critical eye toward latency. Providing a secure remote graphics edge through Dell end-to-end VDI solutions with VMware and Nvidia allows collaborative processes to maintain enterprise security. As well, PowerScale is used in MPAA-audited workflows and satisfies federal and HIPAA enterprise data security constraints.

Can you talk about data recovery, backup, orchestration?
To help our users keep their data fully backed up and recoverable, Dell PowerScale OneFS has features to help our customers back up and recover their data. For example, SnapshotIQ provides protection against smaller-scale data loss, while SyncIQ can help protect against larger-scale catastrophic failures with asynchronous replication to an off-site disaster recovery cluster. Or it can be used for backup in the same data center.

SnapshotIQ offers scheduling to determine when a snapshot should be captured and how long it should be held before deletion. SyncIQ uses policies to make it easy to manage synchronization and linear restore to detect and restore consistent, point-in-time changes between cluster replication sets.

Do you see ransomware as a big concern for your users? What system do you have in place?
Our goal is to help our customers mitigate risk with solutions that are not only rapidly deployable but that also use automation to act in case of a breach.

We offer a range of cyberprotection solutions for Dell PowerScale and ECS, powered in part by the Superna Eyeglass suite to fortify the data layer. These solutions allow our customers to detect cyberattacks in real time, isolate data with smart air-gap technology and rapidly recover operations and data in case of denial of data access or denial of a key service.

Are you working with NVMe? What are the benefits?
Our Dell PowerScale F600 and F900 models include NVMe drives. NVMe offers reduced latency in the host software stack, higher I/O operations per second and lower power consumption. One example of how this is being used in M&E workflows is using NFS over RDMA to serve uncompressed 4K and 8K single-stream workflows in DI and finishing suites.

Do you also offer archive/MAM with your tools?
Not only do we offer archive PowerScale node types that can be mixed and matched with our hybrid and all-flash nodes for the right mix of price and performance, but we also offer interconnectivity with our object storage products like ECS. Using a capability called CloudPools, data can be moved from PowerScale to ECS, where it is saved as objects in a massively scalable, lower-scale cold archive. This entire process can be managed using policies, making it easy to manage when data gets archived. CloudPools also makes it possible to move data into hyperscaler clouds. These capabilities can all be mixed and matched in the same OneFS namespace.

As far as MAM tools, we partner with a range of ISVs. To support integration with their platforms, OneFS’ open API comes with Python SDK and implementation examples integrated with popular, API-driven orchestration software.

Symply’s Keith Warburton 

What do you see as the biggest trend in storage at the moment?
The cloud workflows and remote working for obvious reasons, but I think that users are still in the beta phase of adopting cloud-based service. Users realize that it is the way to go, but in the short to medium term, a hybrid approach is best. In this way, users are continuing to leverage their investment in on-premises infrastructure and are looking for vendors to make that journey easier and cost-predictive.

Over the last few years, lots of media content has gone to the cloud. The three hyperscale public cloud providers offer many extremely valuable data management and AI/ML tools to their customers who have migrated large parts of their data estates to those providers over the past few years. But in our direct experience, even the wealthiest of customers is finding their cloud spending to be far greater than originally projected.

They also see the long-term values in bringing their AI and ML processes back on-prem. I think this is a catalyst for the shrewd enterprise to start its repatriation strategy to take localized control of their data, monetization processes and associated costs.

What types of storage do you offer?
We offer a range of solutions that include high-performance shared storage, ultra-fast and rugged Thunderbolt eight-bay shuttle RAID incorporating Seagate Mach.2 technology, a diverse portfolio of desktop and rackmount Thunderbolt- and SAS-connected LTO devices, and a globally distributed storage mesh.

We recently released SymplyPerifery and SymplyTransporter.  SymplyPerifery is an S3 cloud-native, in-facility appliance with unlimited scalability optimized for media workflows. SymplyPerifery provides cost-predictable, highly durable protection for long-term content preservation and can be easily accessed from anywhere.

SymplyTransporter is a secure content shuttle. It takes the native S3 technology in SymplyPerifery and shrinks it into a portable storage appliance, allowing companies to quickly and securely transport content from edge locations to their facilities.

Who typically uses your storage?
The diverse nature of solutions means our products are used by a wide range of customers, from larger enterprises to SMBs to individual creative professionals, such as DITs.

If working in the cloud, what are your egress costs? Is that built into the cost of your product?
Nebula, our globally distributed storage mesh, is public cloud storage designed for content creators and owners. It’s affordable, with a low per-terabyte cost, and it’s cost-predictable. Nebula has no charges for ingress, egress or API operations and no additional charges for support.

The globally distributed nature of Nebula’s mesh means data is never siloed and can be easily replicated between geos to support real-time collaboration and multi-cloud workflows.

What about remote storage. How are you making that workflow stronger/more secure?
Today’s workflows process massive amounts of content and transport that content back to a facility for post. For that reason, we created SymplyTransporter, our S3-native portable appliance, that can either be used as a stand-alone device or in conjunction with an in-house SymplyPerifery cluster. In the latter configuration, users can plug the SymplyTransporter in to the in-house cluster and copy data can into the main cluster at the push of a button. Once the data transfer is complete, the SymplyTransporter can be reset in minutes and made ready to go back out on location.

The advantage of using our Perifery software in a portable appliance is that you get erasure coding, which provides higher reliability than traditional RAID, as data protection being applied at an object level rather than block.  This combination of technology also makes the SymplyTransporter impervious to attack, as there is no file system to encrypt with ransomware or infect with malware.  It is also highly secure, featuring encryption in flight and at rest, and the object nature of the system means users need secure keys to access any data on the system. If a key is lost or stolen in transit, there is no way for a third party to access data stored on the system. This is especially important given that most of the major studios are mandating increased security for transporting content between locations.

Can you talk about data recovery, backup, orchestration?
Typically, we encourage a best practice of 3-2-1 backup strategy (three copies of your data on two different types of media, with one of the copies stored off-site). Or even 3-2-1-1-0, which ensures that one of the copies is offline or “air-gapped” and that, importantly, backups and/or archives are verified without errors. We have many ecosystem partners in this arena, including Atempo, Archiware, Hedge, StorageDNA, Tiger Technology, YoYotta and XenData, so we can easily provide the best-of-breed solution for specific customer requirements.

Do you see ransomware as a big concern for your users? What system do you have in place?
Ransomware is a concern, but too many media customers are in denial about the problem or just don’t believe that it would happen to them. Recent security reports suggest there are ransomware attacks happening every 10 seconds somewhere in the world.  So it is not a question of if but when.

Unfortunately, in the media and entertainment world, customers are not talking as openly about their experiences with ransomware attacks, in contrast to the enterprise and government verticals, where information and experiences are more readily shared.

As part of our SymplyPerifery product, we are including DNAfabric vision. This software can scan storage systems to look for media and hardware failures along with the providing early warning of ransomware attacks. This allows system administrators to act before systems become inoperable and require backups to be restored.

Are you working with NVMe? What are the benefits?
We incorporate NVMe into Perifery, Transporter and Workspace XE as needed to provide performance enhancements. In Transporter and Workspace XE, we have a small form factor for the available capacities combined with dual 25GbE as standard. To deliver the highest possible performance option, we employ NVMe modules that can deliver 3GB/s per module and scale to over 10GB/s. NVMe uses a PCIe interface that has a very low latency combined with high bandwidth, making it ideal for certain types of scenarios, such as VFX renders, on-location camera card offload and high-performance shared workflows.

Do you offer MAM with your tools?
When it comes to MAM, SymplyPerifery, SymplyTransporter and SymplyNebula integrate with Axle.ai to make to content easily searchable by using AI tools, creating custom workflows, browsing H.264 proxies and using Axledit as a shared timeline editor — so creative teams can be dispersed around the globe.

The Perifery Panel provides content browsing, advanced metadata search, metadata enrichment and the ability to drag and drop files from Perifery or Transporter onto the Adobe timeline. This gives users one place to search for media based not just on file names, but on the metadata associated with that file (director, actor, DP, day, time, etc.).

The Perifery Panel gives operators who are logging content the ability to directly enrich metadata from within Adobe Premiere. This potentially reduces the need for a MAM or can reduce the number of client licenses for a MAM.

DataCore’s Alex Grossman

What do you see as the biggest trends in storage at the moment?
It’s very interesting. The biggest trends I am seeing are related to optimizing storage usage. It’s not the traditional optimization of storage space we saw as larger formats were taking up large amounts of primary storage. This optimization is all about where content and assets are stored.

People seem more thoughtful about the use of in-facility versus cloud and what goes where in what stage of production and archive. These trends seem to be driven by financial concerns more than anything, especially with so many remote workers and in many cases less control of their work practices. There is a lot of truth in the “cloud boomerang” many people have been talking about and return of in-facility storage in our industry.

What types of storage do you offer?
We primarily focus on production archive and long-term archive as a supplement or alternative to cloud and tape. We put a strong emphasis on security and intact preservation with sophisticated data-rot protection and seamless hardware refresh.

Our products are software-only, using standard x86 hardware or optimized appliances delivered by partners like Symply.  Recently, we worked with Symply to develop in-facility turnkey storage appliances and  what I would consider a game-changing on-set, transportable appliance.

Who typically uses your storage?
With the inclusion of the Transporter on-set appliance, we now cover every aspect of production and archive for media companies of all types — from studios to independents to media and corporate organizations — doing large-scale streaming directly from our Perifery and Swarm products.

If working in the cloud, what are your egress costs?
We are not a cloud-resident product, but we work with all the popular cloud vendors. We offer easy in and out using built-in cloud migration and transfer tools, and we support nearly all third-party tools. Often our Swarm and Perifery appliances are used in conjunction with cloud workflows to help control costs, improve production times and, in many cases, reduce or eliminate egress costs for cost predictability.

What about remote storage? How are you making that workflow stronger/more secure?
Remote storage became a huge focus for us this year — not as the simple single hard drives or small arrays, but as true secure production storage. We have been constantly barraged by people asking for a better way to capture and securely store content at remote locations and on-set, even with just one or two people working remotely.

In the case of on-set, they were asking to transport it back easily and safely to their facility and, once there, upload to the cloud quickly for production while retaining assets locally. We worked with Symply and developed the Perifery-based Transporter. It has full encryption built-in; erasure-coded, object-based disk storage; and is built in to a lightweight and easily transportable rugged enclosure.

Can you talk about data recovery, backup, orchestration?
Content safety is one of our main concerns as a company. The highest level of data resiliency and data durability is what we strive for. We built in the highest level of data-rot protection and use erasure coding to provide better protection against data loss than RAID can provide. Our approach is to be proactive rather than reactive, and we constantly monitor and report the health of our systems. However, no one can predict every situation, so we have certified our products with the leading data protection backup and archive tools in the market.

Do you see ransomware as a big concern for your users? What system do you have in place?
We take ransomware very seriously. Ransomware is becoming a “when” not an “if” in our industry. We have been lucky as an industry so far, but because bad actors target file systems and larger amounts of storage, we are ripe for attack. The more open facilities become with remote production and remote workers, the higher the exposure becomes.

You really cannot effectively bolt protection on, you need to be thinking about it from the start. Think macOS versus Windows as an example in the case of OS security.

Our systems were designed from the ground up to prevent ransomware — it’s inherent in the design. It’s purpose-built secure object storage. Since we are not layered on legacy file systems, there is no entry point for bad actors to get into the core storage or clients. In addition, we can maintain any or all copies to roll back to. We do realize user actions cannot be accounted for in all cases, and that is why we support and have qualified nearly every ransomware protection tool available. This multi-layer approach provides greater options and security.

Do you also offer archive/MAM with your tools?
We work closely with many popular MAM and archive products and have integrated several choices into the SymplyPerifery appliances using Perifery software as offered by our partner, Symply. Our unique metadata awareness features allow faster MAM-initiated searches and metadata updates, improving MAM efficiency. For example, we recently worked with Axle.ai to optimize search on the appliances, with outstanding results.

Leveraging our metadata awareness capabilities and keeping with our focus on workflow efficiency and lowering user costs drove the development of the Perifery Panel, which we introduced at NAB New York this year. In many cases it can replace basic MAM functionality. It is a one-button-install Abode plugin panel that lets users quickly search by file name or metadata without leaving Premiere Pro or any the Creative Suite. It allows inline embedding and updates to metadata on the fly, all with export, encode and sharing right in the panel to speed up general editing. It is especially for use on-set when a MAM or internet is not available.

Zoic Studios’ Saker Klippsten

Zoic Studios is a visual effects and entertainment studio crafting visuals for film, television, advertising, video game and interactive projects. While primary offices are located in Los Angeles, Vancouver and New York, Zoic is a remote work-first company, with employees spread across much of North America.

What sort of storage are you using? On-prem, cloud, hybrid?
Zoic spans multiple geographic locations and uses on-prem, flash-based Dell Isilon clustered storage as our source of truth and Google’s persistent SSD for our cloud rendering bursting operations.

Are you still also using the equivalent of sneakernet? Running drives around?
The pandemic pretty much put the nail in that coffin. Ninety five percent of the data we receive is through the internet, while fewer than 5% is via sneakernet. Commercial projects cannot seem to let go of this workflow, mostly because they are ad hoc-run, and there is no real pipeline setup on the production side like there is with series or film. We do, however, deliver final archives to studios on removable media such as LTO or large, hard, multi-terabyte portable RAIDS.

Do you use a MAM?
We have our own custom in-house media asset manager that snapshots and migrates completed projects to deep storage and archives to tape while still maintaining a browsable file structure. Production can simply add files to a checkout cart and migrate files back to production storage.

Where are some of your pain points surrounding storage? Any wish lists for those who are making storage products?
I have been doing storage for a long time — over 23 years — and we were Isilon customer number two. We also helped inform the feature sets of Qumulo and a few others. But no one has really been able to make a performant geospanning file system that takes a file located across the globe, transfers the missing bits on the fly and presents it locally for you to access.

There are all sorts of appliances and other vendors that pre-cache or claim to have this working, but it’s far from performant or reliable, or it requires some sort of cloud infrastructure that locks you into more cost for life. So we continue to build our own workflows around Isilon storage and Aspera for syncing files around the globe. Part of that is because we can write tools that work with our Shotgun deployments, so data becomes smart and learns where it needs to be — which might be multiple locations at once.

When teams and shot production are dispersed remotely across the globe, you cannot afford to have employees waiting on data transfers; you need to be two or three steps ahead. So having a file system that can drive data awareness is important.

Costs are still way too high, and it’s almost on parity with being locked into cloud costs. Logistics and supply chains have sent prices to the moon. Storage vendors need to be more creative in building more value into their products, or they will lose out to cloud platforms. In short: Stop wasting money on storage faceplates no one will look at. Give me a box with fast storage and full-protocol features.