KEEP IT SIMPLE There’s clearly a real need to find new ways to work with storage and improve how we retrieve data. This has motivated companies to push out all kinds of new offerings and services, as they rise to the technological challenge that circumstance has given them. Symplyworkspace is a new solution for smaller teams that provides expandable and portable storage for DITs and agile production teams locally. It has Quantum’s StorNext Axle AI 2020 asset management system built into a self-contained desktop system and supports up to eight simultaneous users collaborating on 4K jobs. It also supports remote access, so users can access proxies on their systems from the comfort of their own homes. Symply’s CEO CMO and founder, Alex Grossman, has been observing how the past year has forced smaller companies and post-production houses to rethink their storage strategy. “The pandemic has shifted many workers to their homes, but their facilities have also had to change,” he says. “We realised that people working remotely, with content coming in from remote sources, would need that to be accelerated and managed better. So, we offered a free Symplyconveyor
THERE IS DEFINITELY A ‘CLOUD FIRST’ MENTALITY THAT HAS BEEN SHIFTED INTO HIGH GEAR
licence to anyone who wanted it,” explains Grossman. And this wasn’t just a gimmick: Symplyconveyor is the company’s high-speed sync and transfer utility, so it’s quite a useful product to be able to access currently. “There is definitely a ‘cloud first’ mentality that has been shifted into high gear,” he continues. “Cloud-first initiatives started to feel real in 2018 and 2019, but at that time, it was a cost-driven exercise. During the pandemic, it changed. People were doing whatever it took to get remote workers up and running. Mostly, they used cobbled-together remote tools and bought all types of external and sneakernet* storage, with little regard for how these new pieces would be integrated back into the workflow or if these would be essentially tossed aside once they got back to some sort of normality.” Some Symply clients then decided to add more capacity at their facilities to provide on-site replication
of content for speed and safety. Grossman has also seen a big pickup in the company’s Symplyworkspace products as an alternative to local storage arrays. It’s that kind of local storage that might be useful during the pandemic for remote or at-home locations, but may have less value subsequently. Symplyworkspace offers the same benefits as a local array, but after people come back to the facility, it can also be used as high-speed, collaborative workflow storage. Grossman concludes: “While cloud workflows, when enabled with good media asset management and overall content management, are a very workable solution, the growing pains are real and they come with a high degree of difficulty.” *Sneakernet is tech slang for systems that require data to be migrated physically by hand, using portable drives, disks or portable drives.
PERIOD OF TRANSITION Covid-19 rushed people into new habits and solutions – will these remain the same post-pandemic?
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