By Randi Altman

Bigger files, more files, remote workflows and a transition to the cloud all play a huge role in how post companies are currently using storage.

The COVID pandemic has pushed post houses to find ways to work from home while still having access to robust workflows, and those who make storage have been paying attention. Almost all agree that when there is no more coronavirus, many artists will continue to work remotely, at least some of the time, leading manufacturers to provide tools that match these new workflows.

For our storage roundtable, we reached out to a collection of post and visual effects pros as well as storage manufacturers.

Light Iron Engineer Brian Sullivan

What services do you provide?
Light Iron provides a wide variety of post services, encompassing the post pipeline from creation to delivery. We have a number of specialties, including — but not limited to — near-set dailies capture and processing, archival services, offline editorial, and finishing and mastering services, including color correction. We also offer remote solutions for dailies, offline and finishing.

What kind of storage do you employ? How much is local versus in the cloud?
That depends on how you define “in the cloud.” In a traditional sense, Light Iron primarily uses on-premise block-level SAN storage to supplement NAS volumes. These NAS volumes are comprised of NVMe, SSD and traditional spinning-disk hardware. LTO is also a key component in providing an archival storage tier in workflows that rely on traditional long-term, low-cost, durable cold storage.

Light Iron currently houses the majority — over 90% — of its data footprint on premises in various form factors. Cloud storage has become more prevalent, especially in our dailies and near-set footage-acquisition processes. Projects such as Utopia and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel used an AWS-backed workflow for acquisition and delivery, specifically a cross-region S3 replication schema. This workflow lessened the burden on distributing content to various endpoints using traditional means and was effectively a “one-to-many” endpoint solution that took a fraction of the time.

When we rolled out our remote offline editorial platform during the pandemic, Light Iron essentially became a cloud service provider. Our systems suddenly were the cloud. Ensuring our clients had 24/7/365 access to their remote offline editorial systems was a shift in ideology, especially when it came to storage. Traditionally, our infrastructure had been designed for internal consumption within the company; the storage in our facilities wasn’t originally purpose-built for the role of “cloud storage and computing” as a client-facing service. Of course, it was built for playing back many streams of 4K video and above, and in short order, we accommodated VFX editors and traditional Avid editors from within a virtualized environment using NVMe-based solutions.

Are you leveraging cloud storage for your remote workflows?
Cloud storage is another tool for us to use to optimize our post pipelines. AWS “Deep Glacier” continues to be an extremely promising and cost-effective way for us to automatically tier disaster recovery and protection copies of data. With encryption at rest and in transit as available benefits, we continue to see growth in our acquisition and delivery workflows that center on AWS-backed pipelines. AWS Direct Connect, when combined with strong, fault-tolerant edge and core infrastructure, provides significant advantages in throughput. This means that deliveries take less time to upload, which in turn yields higher availability of local storage space at the facilities.

How has your storage workflow changed with more artists working from home?
Media management has certainly taken more time to perfect, as not every artist can take a SAN home with them — especially our artists in New York, who have limited space. We’ve seen a shift toward using slower tiers of storage to accommodate proxies and intradepartmental transfers. The pandemic ensured we were fully using our mid- to low-tier storage for delivering content to our data IO and artist teams.

Quite a few shows started with regular, routine in-person color and editorial workflows. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they were forced to vacate the premises in the middle of an edit and finishing process and switch to an entirely remote-based finishing and editorial solution midstream.

This exact scenario happened for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. On-site Avid Nexis storage needed to continue servicing editorial, who was forced to leave the New York facility. At the same time, our finishing department was also forced to vacate the facility and was involuntarily switched to a proxy-based workflow, despite being very much in the middle of the finishing stages. This all happened while receiving VFX and performing live remote color sessions.

The Queen’s Gambit finished remotely, but it was one of Light Iron’s first “hybrid” on-premises and remote offline finishing and delivery solutions, albeit unplanned. Netflix deliverables for The Queen’s Gambit were produced entirely off of our NVMe-based in-house NAS solution while fully remote, which is no small feat, considering deliverables for a single delivery package can routinely top 90+TB of 16-bit EXR sequences for a single show. Our NAS storage played a critical role in holding overflow from our SANs while our data footprint increased exponentially during the pandemic.

Additional space was needed for less traditional work-from-home workflows as well as projects that we were about to deliver that were suddenly halted due to the pandemic. This created a logjam and an instant need for storage. Thanks to prior planning and an expansion of our mid-tier NAS storage, we were able to accommodate this quite easily.

After the pandemic ends, do you see continued use of cloud storage in your workflows and remote work being more common than before?
Absolutely. There is no one-size-fits-all answer for storage, much like the rest of the infrastructure that drives our industry. Cloud storage will continue to play a crucial role in ensuring that local storage can be used for mission-critical playback during live sessions while we allocate departments such as archival and delivery to cloud-based workflows.

Any wishes regarding storage? What would you request of storage makers?
Storage manufacturers and vendors alike need to be careful not to push a one-size-fits-all approach on customers. It is a very difficult proposition for facilities that are entirely based on Fibre Channel to switch to an entirely Ethernet-based infrastructure, and vice versa. While Light Iron is lucky to be a hybrid in that regard, it is important that manufacturers keep in mind that network infrastructure still plays a key component in most scenarios. This holds true for on-premises as well as cloud storage.

Reliability continues to be the driving force in a large majority of the film industry, and feature improvements are often looked at as an afterthought. Artists would rather have playback that is reliable and offers consistent performance over a solution that might offer higher performance but with higher variability. Using technologies that have yet to be perfected at a low-cost, mass-consumption rate comes with a risk-versus-reward decision. Throughput and latency are two different requirements, and storage makers need to be mindful that the film industry is often reluctant to adapt to new technologies. With that being said, Light Iron is proud to embrace new technologies that are constantly evolving the industry we work and live in.

NetApp Media Solutions Strategist Dave Frederick

What kinds of storage are you offering?
NetApp offers a complete portfolio of storage and data management systems that includes NAS, SAN, object storage and HCI, plus software-defined versions of our file system software, OnTap and StorageGrid, for deployment in public and private clouds. We also wrap all these systems with unified system management and automated optimization software tools. It’s important for our customers to be able to get the best tools for their environment and workflows without having to deal with silos of storage from a lot of different vendors.

Which of your products are you virtualizing in the cloud, and what cloud platform are you using?
We offer our flagship storage operating system, OnTap, and all of its capabilities in AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM. Many applications in our industry are not object-based; they expect to see files, and by putting our file system in the cloud, it allows customers to maintain file access for end users and reduce the complexity and additional software to work with objects.

Are you enabling multi-cloud workflows, and how well are these working for your clients?
Regardless of the cloud — or clouds — you prefer, OnTap allows files to flow easily between them, or down to the ground in private clouds and primary storage. Most clients typically choose a cloud provider as primary repository and then burst into other clouds for unique services they provide. In these cases, we can optimize and automate the access to data across clouds for this type of work.

What sort of storage equipment are M&E customers buying during the pandemic, and how has this changed from before the pandemic?
Now it’s all about remote access to content and supporting artists and developers working from home, regardless of their bandwidth and IOPS requirements. NetApp has many options to solve this for customers, ranging from automatic caching of data only when called for, prepopulating workstation users with working sets of data, creating highly distributed and easy-to-manage VDI services, and PCoIP systems with partners like Teradici and Nvidia. It all depends on the requirements of the user and the organization.

What trends have you been seeing?
Other than remote access? As expected, the industry is embracing object storage as it becomes more mature and more interoperable. People are learning the value of a long-term content repository that not only allows greater access than traditional archive systems, but also transcends technology trends and adapts to new data media formats as they appear.

The other trend is AI. What started out as companies using hyperscaler-based machine learning to augment their content metadata has grown to the point that companies are now creating their own AI infrastructures to glean data such as viewing habits, retail and location information associated with content, and predictive analysis for business decision making.

What is the top question you get from people looking for new storage?
“I need to start using the cloud, but I’m not sure how to do it efficiently and cost-effectively, and I don’t know about the performance.” For most customers, the answer isn’t an all or nothing approach, and many are choosing a hybrid of tightly linked on-prem and cloud-based systems that can move content to the most efficient and capable place for the job. It’s really the same challenge that media companies have always faced: “How can I make sure that the right data is in the right place for the right people at the right time?” That’s pretty much all NetApp thinks about and what our products and services are built to do.

DigitalGlue’s Creative.Space Product Manager of Post Nick Anderson

What kinds of storage are you offering?
DigitalGlue’s Creative.Space provides a range of network attached storage (NAS) servers — from portable enterprise servers for the desktop to rack-mounted systems that scale to multiple petabytes. Our systems are modular with a software-defined architecture that makes upgrading and migrating significantly easier than legacy storage architectures. The Creative.Space storage servers are part of our On-Premise Managed Storage (OPMS) service offering that bundles fast hardware, intuitive workflow and management software, and proactive support via a monthly or annual rate.

After selling storage for over a decade, we experienced the pain points our customers had and designed Creative.Space as a turnkey solution with an opex pricing model, removing the large upfront capital expense with associated annual service contracts and ongoing IT knowledge or support.

Which of your products are you virtualizing in the cloud, and what cloud platform are you using?
In reality, “cloud” is a marketing term that hides the fact that all you are doing is paying for computers in someone else’s data center that you have no control over. This is why cloud storage is fine for Word docs or Excel spreadsheets, but not when it comes to video files, especially those that are 4K and up.

By using the cloud, editors lose the ability to work with uncompressed video associated with 10, 25, 40 and even 100GB network connections. While there are on-demand workflows where using a cloud service makes sense, it isn’t the one and only solution to your unique storage problems or workflow roadblocks.

To tackle the challenges brought about by COVID-19, Creative.Space has evolved into a “Fog” solution in a marketplace currently fixating on “the cloud.” We call it Fog because the user experience blurs the lines between local and remote workflows. With the cloud, users must upload and download files to and from a remote system, which doubles wait times and often causes havoc to file and folder structures. Fog allows remote users to instantly access and edit with proxies optimized for the internet, and then they can sync files peer-to-peer directly overnight when they are not working. Our Creative.Space desktop and web applications work the same for local and remote users, with one-click secure setup for nontechnical users.

Our next question is about using multi-cloud workflows, but not sure that fits.
Well, our Fog solution looks at local and cloud systems as equal in a peer-to-peer network. An example of this is installing one of our rackmount systems, such as an Auteur, in the client’s facility and then having portable Rogue systems at the homes of individual users, such as editors and DPs.

With locally accessible storage, footage can be uploaded at fast speeds, either through a workstation or directly to the storage using our ingest tool. Footage is available right away via SMB or FTP. While there are a lot of new solutions in the market for file transferring, they all add extra costs to each transaction. All of our storage systems come with a built-in FTP server that is integrated with our LDAP user management system, allowing users to securely browse the entire file system with limited access based on permissions.

What trends have you been seeing?
Since COVID-19, I’ve seen lots of teams keep it simple and just ship out one drive for each user with all the media for the production or using a cloud solution as a middleman for distributing proxy files.

Something else I’ve seen is post houses with strong in-house IT teams transitioning into quasi-internet service providers, stockpiling servers and workstations in the cloud to provide turnkey remote services for clients. These post houses are competing with more established companies providing premium virtual workstation solutions optimized for high quality and low latency.

When it comes to high-end production where content is sensitive, the status quo today for remote workflow is to host both the storage and the workstations in the cloud and then stream the screen to the user, so that none of the media files are accessible outside the firewall.

The final trend has been teams of all sizes looking for NAS solutions for their remote workflows.

What is the top question you get from people looking for new storage?
Every single customer that comes to us has asked about media asset management (MAM). In building Creative.Space, our first phase of development was focused on designing a storage solution that nontechnical creatives and managers could use intuitively without relying on IT for day-to-day operations. For the last few years, I’ve also been working with our early adopters to develop what we are calling the MAM-less MAM that seamlessly integrates into the creative process, reducing work for creatives rather than adding to it. This solution will be deeply integrated into our Fog architecture.

Senior Post Founder Josh Senior

What services do you provide?
At Senior Post, we offer full offline/online workflows for TV, streaming, films and commercial content.  We also do network deliverables and provide LTO archival storage.

What kind of storage do you employ in your studio/post house? How much is local versus in the cloud?
We use QNAP NAS devices, and we use 100% local. Since the NAS devices are accessible from remote devices we use it as our own “cloud storage.” We have well over 500TB of storage accessible through Gigabit internet so there’s no need for us currently to employ cloud services.

Are you leveraging cloud storage for your remote workflows?
No.

How has your storage workflow changed with more artists are working from home?
We’ve started using VPN services to allow people to either access files for easy download and sharing, or in some cases allow artists to work live off of the VPN.

After the pandemic ends, do you see continued remote workflows?
At the rate that the world is evolving, I think it is far too soon to speculate on what will happen after the pandemic ends. Having said that, there are tangible benefits to remote work that we envision incorporating into our workflows moving forward.

Any wishes regarding storage? What would you request of storage makers?
At the moment we’ve got more or less all we can ask for.
(Special thanks Senior Post online editor/technical manager Christian Rush for his input as well.)

OWC Founder/CEO Larry O’Connor

What kinds of storage are you offering?
In addition to many options in Thunderbolt storage solutions — from bus-powered portable 2800MB/s SSDs to desktop dock/drives to dual-bay, quad and eight-drive HDD/SSD/2.5-3.5 arrays — we also offer a selection of universal USB external desktop and portable drives. This includes our latest portable SSD, the Envoy Pro Elektron, that is compatible with all USB 3 Type A- and USB C-equipped Macs and PCs for up to 1100MB/s at a size smaller than a credit card. It’s waterproof, dustproof and virtually crushproof — it pretty much requires a steamroller to destroy it.

Which of your products are you virtualizing in the cloud, and what cloud platform are you using?
Our backend partner and architecture is currently confidential. Solutions including SoftRAID, BRU and new applications that are near release are all planned for cloud support aspects.

Are you enabling multi-cloud workflows?
Not as of yet. Our solutions today are primarily locally attached solutions. They are compatible with and part of multi-cloud workflows but are not directly implemented for it. Solutions like our Jupiter arrays do provide multi-point sharing and replication between sites.

What sort of storage equipment are M&E customers buying during the pandemic? What trends have you been seeing?
While we’re seeing much of the same in terms of arrays like our ThunderBay 4, 8 and Flex 8 solutions, we are seeing a lot more demand for compact and easy-to-ship high-speed solutions, including our OWC Envoy Pro EX, ThunderBlade and the Helios 3S, which allows fast interchange with U.2 SSD modules.
What is the top question you get from people looking for new storage?
Thunderbolt 4 really confused a lot of people, and the large majority of questions have been about what it means for their Thunderbolt 3 systems or the future of the Thunderbolt 3 solutions they own. The good news is that Thunderbolt 4 is more a marketing position versus any change to the capability or compatibility versus Thunderbolt 3. I have done a lot of interviews, panel discussions and some videos explaining this over the past couple months.

IMF VFX Co-Founder/VFX Supervisor Sally Goldberg

What services do you provide?
All VFX and 3D animation, including creatures, effects animation, set extensions, matte paintings, greenscreen compositing and cleanups. We also offer shoot supervision and design services.

What kind of storage do you employ in your studio/post house? How much is local versus in the cloud?
We have around 50TB of fast RAID storage (Synology rack stations), and we back up our data to a cloud backup service. We are pretty flexible about which cloud services we use on a project, as it often depends on the production and the artists we are involved with. Sometimes we simply use Dropbox or send files across with Aspera or Signiant Media Shuttle. Other times we use a centralized data resource.

Are you leveraging cloud storage for your remote workflows?
We are using an Amazon workflow on our next project to allow artists to access their shots remotely.

How has your storage workflow changed with more artists working from home?
We are starting to move more to a centralized system and looking into working with artists using this for both storage and processing. We are constantly evolving our workflow as internet speeds and technologies improve.

After the pandemic ends, do you see continued use of cloud storage in your workflows and remote work being more common than before?
Absolutely. We have always worked with remote artists and workflows, and we are not planning to change.

Any wishes regarding storage? What would you request of storage makers?
Generally, we need big fast data storage, and as much as possible.

Dell Technologies Senior Biz Dev Manager/M&E Alex Timbs

What kinds of storage are you offering?
Dell EMC PowerScale scale-out NAS is our primary media and entertainment storage offering. It’s the next generation of our Emmy-winning Dell EMC Isilon. The PowerScale family includes the F200 and F600, two new all-flash 1U nodes that add to our existing line of all-flash, hybrid and archive nodes. These new nodes are the product of constant communication with our customers in regard to the features that matter most to them. Our customers were looking for more modularity and granular expansion options without sacrificing performance, scalability and enterprise features.

Which of your products are you virtualizing in the cloud, and what cloud platform are you using?
Rather than virtualizing in the cloud, we offer native PowerScale storage deployed within public cloud platforms. An example is our PowerScale for Google Cloud offering, which gives customers the ability to take advantage of the performance, scalability and enterprise features of PowerScale that is deployed at GCP facilities for minimal latency between PowerScale and GCP compute and services. Customers can also directly connect to their preferred public cloud with PowerScale for Multi-cloud, which supports all major cloud providers.

Are you enabling multi-cloud workflows, and how well are these working for your clients?
Yes. Our PowerScale for Multi-cloud offer uses PowerScale co-locations to make data available to AWS, Azure and GCP simultaneously. This offer is great for things like burst rendering, as customers can choose between providers based on realtime pricing fluctuations while ensuring that data sovereignty and content security obligations are far easier to achieve. These solutions are helping customers take advantage of public cloud services as needed while eliminating expensive egress fees and time-consuming data transfers, all while taking advantage of high-performance file storage and keeping their IP secure on TPN-aligned infrastructure.

What sort of storage equipment are M&E customers buying during the pandemic?
Storage aside, our customers are looking for ways to realize value faster while continuing to empower creatives, optimize workflows and drive innovation — and that is apparent in purchasing decisions. They are looking for platforms that can expand in smaller increments, support for opex models (either through integration with public cloud or on-premises “pay by the drip” models) and management features that make life easier for IT teams and production management.

While cost and value have always been important considerations, they have now come to the forefront as amortization models have shrunk from years to months. PowerScale ultimately came to fruition based on the fact that we listened specifically to our customers and took these shifts into account. We had to develop the right technology for the right use cases to meet evolving M&E customer needs, and we’ve set ourselves up to be able to continuously innovate based on the constant feedback received from our amazing customers and partners.

What trends have you been seeing?
At a high level, we are seeing a major focus on empowering people through investments that can help maintain and improve collaboration without sacrificing trust and security. The demand for remote workflows, as an example, is placing a ton of pressure on IT teams to overhaul the way they deliver services to stakeholders.

Many companies are looking to overcome some of this challenge via cloud providers and virtualized on-premises solutions that allow an IT team to continue managing centralized IT that offers security despite a larger geographical footprint, as creatives work from wherever. For storage, this means shared storage that can accommodate global production teams.

What is the top question you get from people looking for new storage?
While the top question we get is along the lines of, “How can I leverage technology as an enabler of quality, quantity, efficiency and, now more than ever, value in my business?” There is always the unspoken question that exists with all of our customers: “Do I trust you, and do you understand my business?”

Luckily for us and our customers, we have a team of global M&E industry SMEs that have worked in every part of the industry, including former VFX CIOS and broadcast executives. These experts are laser-focused on working with customers to put together the best solutions for their business, influencing product roadmaps and pursuing important industry initiatives — including the development of stable reference architectures, ensuring alignment with TPN requirements, and ongoing work with major M&E software vendors to develop qualified solutions.

Paul Wright CTO Freefolk 

What services do you provide?
Freefolk provides VFX, animation and color grading for film, television and commercials.

What kind of storage do you employ in your studio/post house? How much is local versus in the cloud?
We use a Pixit Media PixStor for all production storage. We have Flames, Baselights and Nuke Studio attached as PixStor clients, allowing us to play back 4K media from the PixStor. We are 100% local with production storage.

Are you leveraging cloud storage for your remote workflows?
We aren’t using cloud to aid remote workflows. Our artists only receive pixels in our WFH solution, this means no client data leaves the facility. Our artists connect to the facility over our secure VPN, once they have gone through multiply authentication stages, they can connect to their Freefolk workstation using HP Remote Boost software to send pixels back to their local machines, with this method we have dual-screen and Wacom pressure.

After the pandemic ends, do you see continued use of cloud storage in general and remote work being more common than before?
We see cloud storage having benefits. This was true before the pandemic, but it is still too expensive to be a tier-one option for production data.

We do see WFH being more common, as we’ve all proved that it is possible, and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I expect us to continue to embrace a flexible/hybrid approach to WFH. It has benefits for everyone.

Any wishes regarding storage? What would you request of storage makers?
I would like cloud egress fees to reduce, a simpler solution when faced with pricing cloud storage and for SSD/flash arrays to be more affordable.

Symply CEO/Founder Alex Grossman 

What kinds of storage are you offering?
Symply provides shared storage based on Quantum StorNext. Our solutions are designed to provide small, medium and large post and VFX facilities fast and simple collaboration. From desk-side Thunderbolt 3 connectivity with the SymplyWorkspace to hybrid Fibre Channel and Ethernet-based SAN storage with SymplyUltra, all Symply systems share a common philosophy and architecture.

We designed our systems around virtualized-software-defined principles. All our system, thanks to their virtualized design, provide the ability to integrate workflow-centric applications. For instance, all SymplyWorkspace systems come with integrated Axle ai 2020, a built-in media asset manager. Both SymplyWorkspace and SymplyUltra products can host our SymplyConveyor, a fast, low-cost transfer and sync application that assists in remote workflows and facilities. We support Azure, Google and AWS cloud applications and many post-workflow-specific applications.

Which of your products are you virtualizing in the cloud, and what cloud platform are you using?
We currently only support transfer and sync with popular cloud services, and our SymplyConveyor can be configured to use AWS or our own private cloud relay for cloud-based operation.

Are you enabling multi-cloud workflows, and how well are these working for your clients?
We support remote workflows through SymplyConveyor and use of Axle 2020. We are finding that most of our clients’ cloud use is driven by their customers’ requirements, and we support direct, unattended transfers across all popular cloud compute and storage platforms.

Our clients have workers located remotely and are using a variety of tools that we support, and many are locating SymplyWorkspace systems at remote locations and user locations (homes, etc.) and interconnecting them with SymplyConveyor. This allows them to use local storage with automated sync and transfer, but they’ll still be able to use the storage in a shared collaborative fashion when they bring it back to the facility after the pandemic. Alternately, the advantage of SymplyWorkspace is the ability to use it for DITs and on set for shared storage. This gives them maximum usage after the pandemic.

What sort of storage equipment are M&E customers buying during the pandemic, and how has this changed from before the pandemic?
We offered SymplyConveyor for free during the pandemic, and many people took us up on the offer. Some clients decided to add more capacity in their facilities to provide on-site replication of content for both speed and safety. We also have seen a big pickup in our SymplyWorkspace products, as more companies are looking at them as an alternative to local storage arrays, which would be useful during the pandemic but may have little value afterward. SymplyWorkspace provides them with collaborative workflow storage they can use fully after users get back to the facility.

Before the pandemic we were seeing a huge move toward cloud-first architectures for archive and delivery; during the pandemic we have seen this shift to cloud-based post production, mostly editing.

What trends have you been seeing?
1. Cloud-first — Across all storage needs now, and along with that, the tools to manage what goes in the cloud and what stays in the facility. Far less “complete movement to the cloud” than we saw in 2018 and 2019.

2. Pandemic fear — Doing whatever it takes to get remote workers up and running, including buying all types of external and sneakernet storage without regard to how or if these new pieces will get integrated back into the workflow or thrown away once we get back to some semblance of normal.

3. Lower cost and better managed content movement — from ingest and delivery to intra- and interfacility content movement. With people shifted out of the facility and more work being spread across facilities, where its destined to be shifted out to workers, knowing where everything is at any time is getting critical. No one seems to have gotten this down to a science yet.

What is the top question or questions you get from people looking for new storage?
How fast is it, and how much does it cost? This seems never to change.

BlueBolt CTO George Siddiqui 

What services do you provide?
BlueBolt is a visual effects company based in central London. It specializes in compositing, computer graphics and digital matte painting for film and television productions.

What kind of storage do you employ in your studio/post house? 
All local on PixStor from Pixit Media.

Are you leveraging cloud storage for your remote workflows?
Not currently.

How has your storage workflow changed with more artists working from home?
The major difference here is that our server room is no longer on-prem. We’ve relocated that infrastructure to data centers. We use Teradici and HP RGS to ensure people working from home can remote into workstations connected to our network at BlueBolt.

After the pandemic ends, do you see continued use of cloud storage in your workflows and remote work being more common than before?
In our next round of storage purchases, we’ll seriously cost up cloud storage versus on-prem for some of our storage requirements.

Any wishes regarding storage? What would you request of storage makers?
We’re always after faster, bigger and more affordable storage.

EditShare CTO Stephen Tallamy

What kinds of storage are you offering?
EditShare is known for its media-engineered shared storage workflow. Its flagship solution, EFS, is a software-defined storage solution that scales from small, all-in-one solutions to a multi-node, highly available cluster. This allows customers to build systems that scale with their needs and cater to a wide range of video formats.

Which of your products are you virtualizing in the cloud, and what cloud platform are you using?
We have a cloud blueprint that extends to a wide range of clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Tencent cloud, AliCloud and Huawei. We have a deep integration with a range of AWS services but also offer customers the choice should they wish to use other platforms.

Are you enabling multi-cloud workflows, and how well are these working for your clients?
We have been enabling multi-cloud workflows for the last five years. Our customers have long been asking for the ultimate in remote workflow flexibility. Whether that means hiring video editors from across the globe or simply letting employees and contractors work from home, production and post houses no longer want to be tethered to their machines, and COVID-19 has only accelerated this desire.

What sort of storage equipment are M&E customers buying during the pandemic?
We are seeing a rapid shift to cloud-based media management and the open storage solution EFSv. With EditShare in the cloud, you can run as many edit rooms as you need; it’s incredibly efficient.

Additionally, moving to the cloud means you can leverage AI and big data for workflows, something most of our customers did not have with their on-prem infrastructure. Beyond the business benefits, there are also personal ones of spending more time at home and with family.

The days of picking a vendor with a closed environment are coming to an end. COVID-19 is proving the point that regardless of how much you may love a brand, if they are not open to cloud and remote workflows, they can become a block to you and your business overnight.

What trends have you been seeing?
After speaking to many end users over the past several months, I can see the thought process is changing. Where they used to be hesitant to move to the cloud, they are now asking themselves if they really need all of that infrastructure in a building that they may not be sitting in full-time or be able to access easily. They are now considering, more than ever, how to achieve some or all of their work remotely. The thought process centers on business continuity and how to align with a new way of working.

We are also seeing a trend to move away from moving video from facility to facility and rather find ways to keep video stored in one place and then provide access to users at the right time and with the right tools.

What is the top question you get from people looking for new storage?
Just about every customer has had questions around moving parts or all of their operations to the cloud. I have found that many are looking for a mix of on-premise comfort with the elasticity of the cloud.

A big part of the conversation also revolves around the cost of working in the cloud. It could be fairly prohibitive, particularly at scale.

This was the case until we introduced seamless proxy editing with EFSv. In addition to the cost reduction, the user experience is far better, as it eliminates the need to conform, thus eliminating the headaches that go along with that workaround.

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Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.