Digital content is exploding, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry, which has had its fundamental business models upended by recent advances in digital content delivery. The industry is rapidly evolving from distinct, well-understood revenue models — subscription-based models, advertising-supported and public-funded — to overlapping models where organizations must monetize content across a wide range of distribution platforms.
Combined with advances in camera and imaging technology, this digital distribution trend requires today’s content creators to shoot, post and deliver content more rapidly and at higher specifications than ever before. Thus, it’s ever more important for these organizations to deploy and maintain a data management infrastructure that keeps up with the demands of these new workflows. With 4k here today, 8k on the horizon, higher bit-depth RAW recording formats and High Dynamic Range mastering on the rise, the data load per stream is demanding more than ever from the storage systems on which companies depend for their day-to-day productivity. Add to that mix the pressure of shrinking production budgets, and the case for innovative, flexible, cost-effective, high performance shared storage becomes clear.
A new storage approach for advanced post-production workflows
Today’s advanced post-production workflows benefit from a storage approach that increases bandwidth and storage volumes to accommodate the raw data requirements, while also offering a wide range of configuration options and drive choices to fit each unique workflow.
When put into practice, this approach enables system designs that fit a company’s specific needs, while reducing total cost of ownership. By sharing full-resolution assets efficiently and effectively, organizations eliminate isolated data silos and reduce management costs while boosting facility-wide performance. When that happens, modern media organizations can fully leverage their valuable content in today’s shifting distribution landscape.
Case in point: Seagate RealStor 5 Series
At Seagate, we’re working to address these M&E content storage requirements with the RealStor 5 series, the latest additions to our RealStor lineup. These new additions, including novel hybrid and all-flash storage arrays, offer extremely fast performance with a modular design that enables the mixing of drive types to best suit the different workflow requirements found in today’s M&E environments.
The RealStor 5 Series — including RealStor 5005 and 4005 — features streaming throughput of up to 7.0 GB per second. The storage arrays minimize dropped frames through the application of advanced streaming algorithms, and boast an industry-leading cost-to-performance ratio, enabling high data availability and performance at aggressive cost points. The RealStor 5 Series can deliver latencies as low as sub-300 microseconds for exceptionally fast response times, while delivering consistent multi-stream performance based on Seagate’s RealStreamTM technology. RealStreamTM buffers stream operations in cache to mitigate underlying performance fluctuations in the storage media, keeping throughput at peak levels.
In addition, the RealStor 5 Series’ system components are custom-engineered from the ground up to work together seamlessly, providing 99.999% availability and reducing drive failure rates and the chance of unexpected downtime, an important consideration in environments with quick turnarounds and deadlines. The arrays also feature high performance levels (7.0GB/s read and 5.5GB/s write throughput) and low latencies, which help avoid dropped frames and boost productivity. Finally, the RealStor 5 series’ cost-optimized design enables customers to invest more in other technology, like software and computing resources, to improve the efficiency and quality of their final deliverables.
And with the addition of hybrid-flash and all-flash models to the RealStor 5 Series lineup, organizations finally have access to purpose-built, affordable, high-performance flash-optimized options appropriate to their specific needs. With these options, they gain the ability to accelerate advanced M&E workflows like image-sequence- based color grading and finishing, VFX production, motion-capture and more. With a “flash in the right places” approach, the RealStor 5 Series enables the perfect balance of HDD-based capacity and flash-based performance.
Learn more at NAB 2017
Revenue models continue to evolve within the M&E industry, and organizations can avoid being left behind by adopting a more flexible storage approach in order to stay nimble. A storage infrastructure that takes into account the shifting nature of the industry will ensure that an organization can leverage its content when and where it needs to, regardless of application.
Seagate experts can discuss these increasing data demands — and provide more details on how its technology can help organizations get the most out of their data — at NAB 2017 in booth SL4527. We hope to see you there!
