16 STREAMPUNK TOOLS Storage
a conform and stitch from each of those resources. The outputs would then go to some on-premises storage, into direct submission to a content management system or social media, but the idea is that the user never has to worry about where the content is.” The other two approaches involve extracting an edit decision list for use in other NLEs for fine-tuning, or to submit an edit for internal review using the Blackbird Player application. Blackbird, Dymond says, avoids being an actual provider of storage. “We’ve been pretty strict on our sales to avoid getting into the cloud storage market. We work with the customer’s existing storage infrastructure, or on AWS or Azure.” BIGGER AND BIGGER DATA One company involved in that global infrastructure is Cloudian, a company founded on the idea of object storage. Object storage is intended, among other things, to reduce the complexity of managing very large amounts of data. Cloudian is a provider of major cloud- based infrastructure, but its products are also available for on-premises installation. Neil Stobart, vice-president of global sales engineering, notes that use cases vary. “I’ve done work where my biggest client had the least amount of staff out of all my customers,” Stobart says, describing warehouses filled with unattended servers. “But if you’re in the data creation business you’re probably going to have your own storage when you buy hardware and software from Cloudian. They’ll stand up a big storage cluster in their data centre.” Cloudian’s storage is compatible with the S3 API, created by Amazon for its
AWS service. “That’s why we can emulate Amazon – because we’re using their API.” Control of where data goes and who accesses it, Stobart explains, is key. “This is one of our unique selling points. We have this concept of policies that we can put on that users’ bucket of data. We provide the storage to the biggest service provider in Europe, a company called GTT Communications, and they have fifteen data centres – fifteen physical locations in countries all over Europe. They have a single cluster that spans all those locations.” Stobart says it would be theoretically possible to automatically keep backup copies of a file at every one of those locations, though two or three generally satisfies people keen on disaster recovery. Stobart concludes by returning to the core issue: the limited availability of network bandwidth. “I was just saying this morning that data is getting bigger and bigger much faster than networking is getting quicker. We’re only just scraping 4K. I was at NAB four years ago and they were talking about 8K then. As that data grows, it’s going to become harder and harder,” he says, before adding: “The networking guys have to up their game.”
THE USER NEVER HAS TO WORRY ABOUTWHERE THE CONTENT IS
THE BIGGER THE BETTER? The increase in internet video quality means that the sheer amount of data involved in producing content for laptops and phones can be huge
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