Leading Music Enthusiast Content Publisher Doubles Video Output with StorNext

With over 13 million monthly readers in over 50 countries, over 35 print and digital magazines, and over 35 web and mobile applications, NewBay Media is the premiere publisher of specialized enthusiast content for music, pro-audio, video, and gaming.

Keeping up with the demand for video content associated with the company’s Music Group was one of its biggest challenges. The content—everything from celebrity sessions to tutorials—is constantly changing, existing material is incorporated into new offerings, and support has to be provided for YouTube and all the latest Apple, Google, Nook, and Kindle formats.

Aging SAN Limits Growth—Solution is Whole-System Upgrade

“Our video production system was an Apple Xsan system that came to us through an acquisition of a publication about two years ago,” explains Anthony Verbanac, NewBay Media’s Director of IT. “It only took us a short time to see that the system couldn’t keep up with the speed that our production demanded. The team ran out of storage on almost every project so we were always writing data off to tape. And the disk was so old that we were beginning to see lots of errors and even signs of data corruption. We knew that we had to do something fast.

“We finally decided that the best and safest way to let us get the benefits of newer, faster technology was to upgrade the entire system all at once.”

Solution Required Performance, Simplicity, Low Cost

The new system would need to let four workstations share files easily, and support all their applications, including Final Cut Pro, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, and Adobe Creative Suite, as well as their existing digital assets. The team needed to roughly double the amount of storage, and they needed higher performance everywhere, simplicity, and low cost.

“We do not have a large IT staff, so it was really important to find a solution that would be turn-key, that could fit in quickly and that would minimize ongoing admin. We needed something that would be easy to install and that would just work once it was in.”

The company included an experienced integrator, Reboot Computer Services, in their search.

Stornext Pro Foundation is Selected

The answer was Quantum’s StorNext Pro Foundation. It integrates all the elements needed for collaboration in smaller workgroups, including the StorNext 5 platform and high-performance RAID. It also makes it easy to scale capacity and add archiving using tape, object storage, or the cloud.

“The StorNext Pro Foundation was exactly what we needed,” Verbanac explains. “It’s an appliance-based solution that is easy to set up and maintain. It gives us the capacity we need today, room to grow in the future, and it is compatible with all our applications and the latest versions of OS X. It was also affordable.”

New Workflow Solution Doubles Output

StorNext links the team’s workstations directly to the SAN, giving editors high-speed shared access to the same files. All the applications still work, and existing content can be edited transparently.

Bill Amstutz, VP and General Manager of NewBay’s Music Group, explains the impact of the new system on the company’s bottom line: “It’s safe to say that the installation of the Quantum solution has made our video productivity at least double what it was without it. In 2015 we produced more than 200 lessons, product demos, and artist interview videos, and about a dozen DVDs. Our revenue directly related to those projects is close to $200k. Without Quantum, upwards of 50% of those videos, and that revenue, would not have been actualized without using additional videography resources.”