Quantum StorNext Enables Content Monetization Workflows

For decades, Deluxe Media Europe has been providing digital delivery services for media and entertainment clients, including broadcasters, major studios, and over-the-top (OTT) providers. It realized that to continue to hold a leadership position, it needed to transition to a fully file-based workflow architecture.

CONTINUED SUCCESS DEMANDS COLLABORATIVE WORKFLOWS

The Deluxe Media team required workflows that would give them seamless, simultaneous access to files, store them cost-effectively, and handle extremely large amounts of data—up to 10TB of content transfer every day. The solution needed scalability and the reliability and speed expected by its global customers. And since a key to the company’s success was DL3—its own content management software—the new system had to support this application.

STORNEXT FILE SYSTEM SIMPLIFIES CLIENT CONTENT MANAGEMENT

The new system that Deluxe Media created relies on Quantum’s StorNext for a pivotal role. Client content is ingested, encoded, and transferred to one of several StorNext file systems. Each one holds approximately 100TB—10,000 to 20,000 files—with capacity to scale to meet future growth.

StorNext gives editors access to each file system from multiple servers and lets them easily migrate content across various locations. StorNext’s Fibre Channel support enables high-performance collaboration and makes near-line archives feel like a local disk drive.

“StorNext is also better than alternatives in how it manages data on disk,” says Dick Grun, senior systems engineer, Deluxe Media Europe. “It doesn’t matter if files are scattered across several sets of disks because the StorNext file system provides transparent access to all of the stripe groups.”

TRANSPARENT INTEROPERABILITY WITH KEY APPLICATIONS

StorNext allows Deluxe Media’s DL3 application to interrogate metadata servers, discover file locations, and initiate file movement across international sites. It also provides interoperability with Digital Rapids, Apple, Aspera, and Signiant, providing a fully integrated workflow. Overall, the new StorNext-based system gives Deluxe Media the ability to ingest files, review or edit them, transcode them into appropriate formats, and then easily transfer them to other Deluxe locations—or to client sites.

COST-EFFECTIVE ARCHIVE MAKES OVER 5PB OF ASSETS AVAILABLE

Deluxe Media uses StorNext to minimize disk space while keeping all content available. A Quantum StorNext AEL6000 tape archive stores over 5PB of content, and the StorNext Storage Manager automatically transfers files from disk to the archive, creating two copies for redundancy. Because the archive is integrated with the file system, all metadata and content can be retrieved transparently by any Deluxe Media facility anywhere in the world.

“We have a lot of film clients and a lot of broadcast clients, so we have around 4 or 5PB of archive storage at our London facility alone,” says Grun. “It’s clearly impractical to store it on disk, but with Quantum StorNext and the AEL Archive on the back end, it’s actually pretty easy to parcel the content off into what seems to be an infinite store.”

Deluxe Media also uses StorNext to provide additional services for its clients, including long-term archival storage of master content and transcoded files.

PREPARED FOR FUTURE GROWTH

“Clearly we’re dealing with demanding content workflows, but StorNext’s seamless integration with our state-of-the-art DL3 system gives us high-performance file sharing, tiered storage, and archive to increase flexibility and greatly enhance our end-to-end workflow management. It also gives the ability to expand the system in response to future demands.”