DigitalGlue has been supporting the industry since 2002. As a systems integrator, the company makes sure to ask the right questions of clients in order to determine what is right for their particular workflows.

When they felt the industry could benefit from a different type of storage model, they set out to develop a new solution. Who better to recognize the need and develop a product and service for this industry than a working post professional? That's the case with colorist Nick Anderson, product manager for post production solutions at DigitalGlue. After years of working in this industry, Anderson has a very specific knowledge of what works and what doesn’t within the post workflow.

With the company’s new offering, creative.space, they are offering users a variety of on-prem storage solutions. To find out more, we reached out to Anderson with some questions.

How did DigitalGlue come about? What's the history of the company?
We like to think that we’re the industry's best-kept secret. If you watch television, chances are something we sold was involved at some point in delivering that content. When we started, we focused on satellite contribution and distribution, and that continues to be a big area for us. Over the years, our clients have turned to us as a technology partner to help them adapt to new technologies, primarily file-based workflows. Now we refer to ourselves as a “glass-to-glass” systems integrator – that’s the glass of the camera lens to the glass of your screen.

We’ve had the privilege to build out studios of all kinds and budget levels. The ability to create custom software has served us well, as we can always account for that last mile that most people don't account for — working with other vendors' gear. Our name, DigitalGlue, comes from our mission to bring together disparate systems to create seamless workflows that professionals enjoy using day in and day out.

How did creative.space evolve? Why storage?
And why now?
For a long time, I’ve been chasing a benchmark: seamless playback of OpenEXR. As a colorist who uses ACES (the Academy Color Encoding System), I found that the future-proof workflow solution needed in order to produce the standard of work I was searching for wasn’t possible with the existing technology on the market. As we began developing the creative.space platform, it became clear that before we dove into delivering new software tools, we needed to lay a hardware foundation that would perform at the level needed for these next-generation media workflows.

Once we reached that benchmark, we knew we were ready to open up our storage solution to early adopters. Why delay launching our platform when we believe we have a solution that is better, faster and cheaper than anything else on the market? We are bringing our storage to artists now and giving them a voice in the development of our software platform as part of our Early Adopter Program.

You're offering storage as a monthly service. How does that work? Why did you design this model?
One of the biggest issues with legacy storage offerings is the underlying business model. It incentivizes vendors to sell new systems rather than support existing customers. The pace that CAPEX purchasing decisions are made means that sales cycles are long and solutions are already outdated by the time they are installed. Support plans are expensive and limited, requiring additional paid hours for an engineer to install updates.

We spent a long time thinking about how we could design a new way to provide the market with storage solutions that would align our interests with the customers while keeping them up-to-date with the latest technology. We call it OPMS – On-Premise Managed Storage, combining industry-leading performance and support into one all-inclusive service that is paid for monthly. By using media intelligence and analytics, we can help customers make better decisions based on their actual needs today and allow them to plan for future growth. Our pricing is so affordable compared to our competition that companies can get the storage they need for less than the cost of a standard support contract or hiring an in-house engineer.

How do DigitalGlue and creative.space work together?
In a nutshell, creative.space is a division of DigitalGlue. As a systems integrator, we can provide full solutions for production, post production, contribution and distribution beyond just the creative.space offering. For our sales team, creative.space is another tool in their belt to help clients find the right solution to fit their needs. For our engineers, this takes creative.space beyond being simply a storage appliance to being part of a complete workflow. In addition to storage, we can provide and integrate media asset management systems, industry-specific furniture, transcoding, specialized appliances and more. When you are talking to creative.space, you are talking to a member of the DigitalGlue team that understands your workflows beyond just our storage.

You also represent other’s storage in addition to offering your own. How do you decide the right tool for the right company? What questions do you ask them when they come to you?
Finding the right storage solution is all about figuring out the formats artists are working with, how much content they are generating, and how many people will be accessing the system simultaneously. Obtaining this information is rarely as easy as just asking the client. Sometimes customers just know they have a problem, and other times they come to us with a solution in mind and just need the last mile. We always meet the client where they are at and fill the gap with hard-earned experience. Often, the insights we gain from site visits and being a fly on the wall are the key to understanding how people will interact with the system day-to-day rather than what it can do on paper.

When evaluating whether a legacy solution or our creative.space offering is best for a client from a business perspective, it comes down to how important ownership is to the client. With creative.space, we make some assumptions when it comes to longevity of hardware; primarily we only keep hardware in circulation that is under warranty. Some clients may be fine with more risk and want to purchase a system and maintain it themselves long-term. This is a valid request, and we look to our existing partners with an already-developed model to handle these clients while still providing that first tier of support ourselves. This allows our clients to use the same trusted support team regardless of what solution they choose and take a multi-tier, multi-vendor approach. We never want to lock clients into a specific way of doing things.

You offer a line of products. Do you offer a growth path from one to the other?
Since we will own the hardware long-term, we’ve designed our line-up to avoid unnecessarily wasteful upgrade paths. Our line was designed after a decade of attempting to sell enterprise media storage, really designed for broadcast, to post production companies. We learned very quickly what artists want — simple and affordable storage that allows a small team (three to 10 users) to collaborate in real-time with the footage their cameras capture. With the myriad RAW and high-resolution formats that have emerged over the last decade, there hasn't been a solution on the market that artists could rely on.

The //AUTEUR series is our entry level (120TB RAW) storage solution. For the //DEUS EX, the next offering in our product line up, the practical target for storage performance was seamless 4K OpenEXR playback that would hold up in a DI session with a client. The goal was to provide an affordable solution that would enable an entire post team to collaborate in real-time within a metadata-rich pipeline. The //DEUS EX is capable of handling three streams of 4K OpenEXR at 24fps to a single client. Both storage offerings use the same underlying hardware, allowing our customers to start with the right solution for their needs today (//AUTEUR) and then rapidly expand their capabilities as their caliber of work increases (//DEUS EX). The process of turning any //AUTEUR into a //DEUS EX (200TB+4.8TB SSD) is as simple as loading up four SSD drives and upgrading the CPU.

When teams grow too big for the //DEUS EX, we have the //BREATHLESS, which can sit on top of the spinning disk as a high-performance scale-out cache. With the common storage needs of the majority of potential customers already met, we wanted to explore how far we could push our technology. Existing SSD solutions have an inherent built-in bottleneck: they use connectors designed for hard drives like SAS and SATA.

The //BREATHLESS features an all-new NGSFF (Next-Generation Small Form Factor) that allows 36 fast NVMe drives to deliver their full performance to the motherboard via PCIe instead of SAS in a 1RU server. We currently have 4TB NVMe drives available, which are actually cheaper per GB than SSD technology. We also have 16TB NVMe drives due to be released later this year, which will allow us to provide over half a petabyte of SSD storage in a 1RU form factor. With up to 10 million IOPS, the //BREATHLESS is ideal for customers with large teams working in high-quality formats like OpenEXR and OTT platforms looking to support 4K and HDR delivery.

How did/does your background as a colorist inform what you offer as a company?
As DigitalGlue’s product manager, it is the core that drives me while building our creative.space platform. I'm getting to design the tools that enable me, and creatives like me, to work the way we want. The colorist is usually the last stop and any mistakes made previously must be fixed before the color process begins, otherwise work must be redone unnecessarily. This conforming process is too often the most time-consuming part of the job. Building workflows to minimize the time wasted with tedious workarounds is what I do both in my work with DigitalGlue and as a post professional.

Any time the client leaves while a technical issue is being resolved is an interruption to the creative work that drives the real value. Through designing workflows for our clients, I have had the unique opportunity to see behind the curtain of the industry. The reality is that the problems the industry struggles with on a day to day basis are avoidable. Our goal with creative.space is to build a software and hardware platform that helps creatives spend their time doing what they love — being creative.