The media industry is undergoing big changes, from the impact of last year’s events to the trend of digital transformation. So media companies need to stay agile and constantly look for ways to improve their operations — one essential area where this comes into play is data storage.
Data storage plays a vital role for media organisations. But as video and media files become bigger, so does the space required for storage, which can be quite costly. Hence, your data storage solution must be quick and efficient to facilitate sharing files across your organisation and increase your overall productivity, reducing the time you spend on admin-heavy tasks.
This article will show you what the current storage landscape for media looks like, what you should consider while choosing a data storage solution, and how Qumulo addresses data storage needs in the media and entertainment industry.
What does the media industry need in a data storage solution?
The storage landscape for media has changed a lot in recent years. HD videos are now the norm, 4K is becoming more prevalent, and 8K is already on the horizon. Media organisations need to create, store, access, manage, and protect massive volumes of data. A reliable data storage solution is thus mandatory to address these needs. Specifically, a storage solution must provide reliable, high-performance data access to speed up creativity and collaboration. But also, they must supply robust management, storage, and protection for petabyte levels of HD, 4K, and 8K content across on-premise and public cloud environments. This will help media professionals remain creative and productive even when working remotely. Data loss is another big concern for the media industry. It can occur due to a variety of reasons, from human error to hardware failure, natural disasters, and — last but not least — cyberattacks. They are more frequent than ever, so media organisations now realise the need for data storage providers that can ensure the safety and security of their data. Furthermore, when you choose a data storage solution, it should allow for rapid scalability and expansion as your business grows while still being cost-efficient. In short, your chosen data storage provider should allow you to expand your cloud storage capacity flexibly, without compromising on cost.How Qumulo delivers what media organisations need
The team at Qumulo have been at the forefront of addressing the needs of the media and entertainment industry. Here’s how they do it, by:- Harnessing the power of the cloud: Media organisations can use Amazon Web Services and Good Cloud to support the rendering and modelling processes, as well as, providing flexibility to multi-location teams.
- Embracing efficient workflows: Qumulo makes it possible to automate and optimise applications to further enhance workflows.
- Making it easy to scale: Media organisations can increase their storage capacity as needed — up to petabyte levels of data — without having to worry about downtime.
- Optimising collaboration: Artists, editors, and producers can access any content from anywhere — using Qumulo’s file system to work together and finish projects on time.
- Protecting data effectively: Qumulo uses erasure coding, local and remote snapshots, and continuous replication, to provide enterprise-level data protection and availability, both in the present and the long term.
- Utilising real-time analytics: Administrators can access built-in, real-time analytics to monitor the usage of the cloud storage environment (including workstations, storage usage, throughput, latency, etc.) and optimise it to boost productivity and promptly manage issues.
- Offering reliable customer support: Qumulo’s customers enjoy instant access to a dedicated storage expert via communication tools like Slack, meaning they can get the support they need at any time.
What Qumulo offers compared to others on the market
While there are other storage solutions on the market, they don’t provide the entire breadth of features that so many media organisations need. Qumulo was designed to do just this:- Real-time analytics: Troubleshooting can be very complex when workflows are in the cloud. Qumulo solves this by giving administrators the ability to see on the GUI, at a glance, which clients are consuming performance, which in turn makes troubleshooting easier.
- Automation: This feature is essential to many workflows nowadays. Automation lets you build, manage, and destroy clusters through a REST API. Qumulo delivers a unique product that can achieve this through their cloud-based broadcast solution.
- Simple at scale: Most media and entertainment organisations lack a dedicated IT department — so having a file system that is simple to scale is imperative. Luckily, increasing the storage capacity and performance is very smooth and easy with Qumulo. This is made possible thanks to the auto-detection of nodes and a background task that redistributes the file system without impacting user performance.
- Cloud disaster recovery: A lot of studios and other media organisations don’t have a second data centre to use for DR purposes, as it requires a considerable amount of time and money to be built and maintained. With Qumulo, however, you can build your DR facilities in the public cloud, which is much more cost-effective and simpler to manage. Instances can be automated to turn on for the replication time frame before auto switching off, which reduces the costs of running instances.
- Support (customer success): To make the customer support experience fast and painless, each customer has access to level-3 engineers on their dedicated Slack channel. All questions are promptly answered and the ‘Time to Resolution’ is always kept to a minimum. This way, issues are briskly taken care of without disruption or downtime.