28 ROUND TABLE Storage
HI, EXPERTS! WE’RE A NEW POST- PRODUCTION HOUSE CALLED DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS (DBATC), AND WE’RE BUILDING A HEADQUARTERS FROM THE GROUND UP IN OUR NATION’S CAPITAL. WE ALSO HAVE TWO OTHER SATELLITE FACILITIES OVERSEAS THAT WE ARE IN CONSTANT COLLABORATION WITH. We have recently been swamped with more and more work – from editing to grading to VFX – and we want to get this new facility up and running fast. Given the amount of material we have to deal with now, we want to make sure our storage set- up is the best it can be, so we have some questions for you about how we might approach best practice for our storage. DBATC: What should our most important consideration be in building storage solutions for Death by a Thousand Cuts? DUNCAN BEATTIE: I feel there is no single consideration but rather a list of priorities to be decided on, and as much as possible to try and define where you are headed as a company. Many are tempted to buy the first thing they find but when it goes into production there can be fundamental tools missing that can make life less stressful for admins and great for the creatives. What I mean by that is, invest in a system that will do exactly what you need it to do right now, and for your best determination of what
The bottom layer is for long-term assets that will rarely need access beyond archive pulls. When you build storage, you need to consider the number of team members in the organisation that will require simultaneous access and how dispersed they are globally. MARC RISBY: Firstly it’s important to understand DBATC’s specific requirement in detail. What are its key workflows? What systems are being used? What’s the life cycle of the data? How does it need to be shared? It’s essential to understand the customer’s needs to make the best choices when looking at shared storage. This is often a reasonable amount of work as the customer may not know all the specifics themselves, especially when workflows have grown organically over time. DBATC: If we don’t care about anything else but price, what are our best storage options? DUNCAN BEATTIE: If price is your only consideration, just make sure that whatever holds your data is, at the very least, reliable and – crucially – protected. Of course, your workflow will suffer because files will have to be dragged away from the system to be worked on, but at least you have a central repository that will be safe. JAI CAVE: You can always build your own NAS solution in-house, but to be honest if you only care about price, your
you’ll need for at least the next five years, if not longer. It’s also a case of taking a close look at what you already have. Finding a new online solution that will help you reuse or repurpose as much as possible of this can be a vital initial cost-saving to a fledgling operation. This also has the benefit of allowing budget to be driven towards your new online storage which is an investment with the biggest possible ROI. From my previous life, as a reseller, I have always maintained the consultative approach, and not just talking about the storage, but how the storage will interact with everything else is key. In short, it’s all about being smart, scaleable and flexible. JAI CAVE: Starting to think about storage policies is the best place to start. If you are looking at storage for the whole facility, then you will be tiering storage based on use cases. The performance you need out of a nearline tier will not be the same as you need out of your finishing and QC storage. Should every tier be part of the same solution? Or does it make sense to look at different products for each tier you need? MEIR LEHRER: In many ways, storage can be viewed as a layered cake. The different layers of the ‘storage cake’ reflect the storage life cycle of the assets. For example, the top layer is assets in need of frequent editing via collaborating parties. The mid layer is where less editing is required, but with relatively new content.
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