DEFINITION September 2018

ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE | ESCAPE TECHNOLOGY

Whatever point you are at in your storage needs, Escape Technology can help; and hybrid storage is just the start THE HYBRID FUTURE

E scape Technology is known for its huge expertise in the high- end world of production but the company’s deep knowledge of new storage solutions is helping each end of the media industry. Storage has always been the core concern of a facility or even single freelancers. Now that same storage can be local, virtualised or in the cloud; but further to that it can be all three. Once you’ve gone past the ‘three freelancers in a room all working off their own machine’ scenario, at some point you need to centralise your workflows. Whether it’s for visual effects, video editing, or anything that requires multiple-person input into a project. Yes, you could work off Dropbox, yes you could work locally but with today’s data and the data requirements that becomes prohibitive when you’re copying around the network and hoping to send and receive large amounts of data. Lee Danskin from Escape explains the process. “At the hub of any good facility, or small company for that matter, is its infrastructure and how it approaches that. Yes, a lot of people might go with a NAS, which is Network Attached Storage, that’s where those three freelancers or three to five like-minded people all decide to start a company – at some point someone is going to need some centralised storage to take that idea forward. That becomes the hub of the whole infrastructure, and how that storage works will affect the workflows you have going forward.”

ABOVE Escape Technology provided Territory Studios with a PixStor system and they use it as part of their workflow for these movies.

latest version of a file, has it updated or not. There are lots of issues with that approach.” This is where the discussion of what the workflow is versus what the centralised storage infrastructure is gets very important. This is something that you need to get right from the start as you need to manage any growth and not hinder it. ESCAPE OFFERS Escape believes that all collaborative media workflows require some kind of centralised storage and you need to be able to connect to that storage quickly and get performance to match your expectations. Usually freelancers will use storage based in their workstation or a NAS, larger, busier studios will use PixStor and the cloud. NAS companies like Synology are part of Escape’s offering and could be seen as an entry level NAS. Scaling up with Supermicro

If you then analyse that basic storage picture, then you can start seeing how deep the range of products and services that Escape can offer is. “For instance,” says Lee, “if you have a NAS you can then back up to things like Amazon Glacier or to cloud storage solutions, but they’re not going to give you what you would call a hybrid workflow. An example of this is to take something in the cloud and map that to my local storage. We’ve seen many people trying to do it with Dropbox for example – you’ve got a Dropbox between multiple people all remotely working and it becomes a huge compromise as you’re always conscious of who has the latest file or the

“ AT THE HUB OF ANY GOOD FAC I L I T Y OR SMALL COMPANY I S I TS I NFRA STRUCTURE ”

54 DEF I N I T ION | SEPTEMBER 20 1 8

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