Posted by Whether you run a post-production house or an in-house corporate video department, your clients are requesting more video assets. And as viewers continue to upgrade to the latest mobile devices and 4K TVs, those clients are pushing you to deliver more of your work in HD, 4K, and other high-quality formats.
As you develop your strategy for accommodating these and other demands, addressing your storage requirements must be a top priority. Getting by with a collection of external hard drives that circulate among your team members by “sneaker net” just won’t cut it.
What should your blueprint for storage look like? Make sure your infrastructure rests on these five pillars:
- Simplicity: Let’s face it: You don’t have a large IT group. In fact, you might not have any IT administrators available to you. Whatever storage solution you choose, it has to be easy to set up and simple to manage going forward. Your team has to stay focused on churning out new videos, not worrying about how to optimize storage capacity or performance.
- Scalability: As you take on more projects and work in higher-resolution formats, you’ll need scalable capacity to store growing volumes of large files. Your solution must let you grow seamlessly, at your pace, without requiring you to frequently rip and replace components.
- Performance: You need a storage solution with the performance to accommodate simultaneous access to multiple streams of large high-resolution files. Editors need to complete their tasks and deliver results rapidly while avoiding latency that can hamper productivity and jeopardize the ability to meet tight deadlines.
- Integration: Your new storage solution won’t help you improve productivity if it doesn’t play nicely with your existing media asset management (MAM) solution or your team’s preferred editing applications. You need a platform that makes it simple for your team members to locate clips, quickly complete post-production tasks, and share project files—without having to alter familiar workflows.
- Affordability: Your budget probably isn’t growing as fast as demand. You need a storage solution that will let you deliver high-quality results today while avoiding excessive expenditures.
Quantum’s Xcellis® Foundation could be the right fit for your team. Xcellis Foundation is an affordable, easy-to-install, simple-to-manage scale-out NAS appliance that provides the capacity and performance you need for both today and tomorrow. Start with 48 TB for a few team members, and scale to several petabytes and up to 10 Ethernet-connected clients.
Xcellis Foundation is powered by the StorNext® 6 shared storage and data management platform—the industry’s fastest scale-out file system. Integration with MAM systems and other applications makes it simple to boost productivity while accommodating your team’s existing workflows.
Ready to learn more about Xcellis Foundation? Visit our web page for an overview, video, and in-depth datasheet.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]