Deluxe Entertainment, Imagica, Level 3 and Starz Rely on DDN

In this age of high definition, on-demand digital media, media and entertainment (M&E) companies are challenged to evolve their IT infrastructure fast enough to keep pace with the data demands of their customers.

Producing, editing and distributing media assets cost-effectively requires a content workflow supported by efficient IT infrastructures. From content capture/ingest to post production to play-out/distribution to active archives, DataDirect Networks, Inc. offers an economical, high performance, and on-demand shared storage environment to address the challenges of M&E companies.

With over 15 years of experience and 600+ media customers, DDN is changing the big media workflows of today, and laying the foundation for scalable and elastic storage infrastructures of tomorrow.
 
Digital studios, broadcasters, cable providers and Internet delivery networks are solving their big media challenges with DDN storage solutions designed for the world’s most content-intensive workflows – from ingest to editing, transcoding, distribution and archiving.

With complete storage portfolio for M&E customers, DDN is enabling improved business agility for clients by delivering 10,000 times greater scalability, 40% datacenter space savings, and 50% less power and cooling, while offering 13 times more bandwidth to process and handle more streams over other competitive offering.

DDN offers file and object storage solutions for every part of the content lifecycle with a single, seamless, end-to-end platform. Unlike traditional enterprise storage, the technology eliminates silos by enabling customers to manage all workflows, all formats, all content and all device types in one place.

With its portfolio of big data and cloud storage offerings, DDN is giving its M&E customers the confidence that their critical systems and information are protected, improving the delivery of digital content across geographically distributed data centers and addressing the storage and workflow performance needs of broadcast and film and post production organizations.  
 
At NAB Show, DDN Showcases Active Archive and Content Delivery Use Cases

• Active Archive Demo: The collaboration story told by post-production company, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, Inc. Learn how Deluxe uses DDN WOS object storage platform to free up expensive tier-1 storage, increase utilization and efficiencies of geo-dispersed compute and creative resources, and create an easier scaling path over time.
• Content Origin and Delivery Demo: Find out how the big content delivery networks solve their largest, unpredictable storage needs. Level 3 Communications LLC demonstrates its Cloud Content Exchange service powered by DDN’s GRIDScalersolution.
• ASG Digital Archive Demo:  Visit the DDN booth to meet DDN partners from ASG Software Solutions and discover how its digital archive (ADA) solution utilizes WOS object storage platform to achieve high performance and cost-effective disk-based archive solution.
• Active Archive Alliance Session: Join DDN and the Active Archive Alliance in room S224 on April 8 from 1:00 – 3:00PM PT for a panel session that will showcase the way active archive technology is delivering capability to media and entertainment IT environments, allowing them to store and retrieve data in ways that weren’t possible before.

Next Generation Content Solutions for Media and Entertainment
Delivering high level of concurrency, with DDN next generation content solutions, collaborative workflows are accelerated, whether local or worldwide. DDN high performance tier-1 solutions help users deploy less storage, servers and networking components than with competitive platforms. And, WOS cloud storage provides a simple, cost-efficient object storage platform to enable revenue opportunities for established content – with active archiving, at nearly the cost of tape. Using DDN technology, M&E customers address their critical high-performance production, editing, collaboration, archive and delivery business challenges, including:

• Broadcast & Film Production and Editing – With larger formats and higher resolution more commonplace, broadcasters, film production companies and post-production houses must overcome the hurdles of crowded storage environments which threaten to slow production and inhibit the creative process. With DDN storage solutions, users can streamline their workflows, eliminate content silos, shorten time to market, thereby unleashing the creative process and reducing the overall cost of production storage. Using a combination of DDN GRIDScaler for tier-1, production storage and WOS for a connected active archive, studios can manage the size of their high performance storage while moving off content quickly and easily to their active archive tier built on WOS storage. This strategy eliminates the complexity of multiple tiers, reducing the overhead of additional storage maintenance and management associated with traditional solutions. With its high data throughput and parallel infrastructure, GRIDScaler, a fast NAS and parallel scale out storage appliance, makes the ultimate production storage solution. WOS object storage is the ideal active archive delivering best balance of high performance, scalability, ease of use and low TCO.  
• Web Content Origin and Delivery Networks – The largest cable and telco television providers that are looking to implement or expand their content origin or delivery infrastructure are often faced with the choice of whether to build, buy or rent their solution. With the WOS solution, users have a storage platform for digital content, making the ‘buy approach’ a smart one. WOS delivers easy setup and administration, low TCO and a high performance online content origin and delivery infrastructure. Capable of scaling to billions of objects in a single instance, WOS enables set up of a multi-petabyte geographically distributed self-healing solution in hours instead of days or weeks, all managed by less than one full time employee. It delivers fast uploads through local ingest, and with a choice of optimized data protection schema, is secure and multi-tenant enabled.
• Cloud Services – WOS is an object storage system that is optimized for fast throughput of large data volumes and fast I/O operations for small files, allowing users to mix different sized objects on a single high performance platform with disk efficiency. This makes DDN storage for hyperscale cloud, social and Internet applications like Internet music-delivery and photo-sharing sites. For multi-site cloud deployments, the built-in WOS Latency-Aware Access Manager will automatically address data access requests to the location with the lowest latency. Integration between WOS and GRIDScaler offers users data management and ILM tools with cloud connectivity to manage, distribute and archive data. By embedding the file system inside the storage, DDN storage provides non-disruptive and infinite scale out capacity to maximize the value of content assets.
• Collaboration and Global Distribution – Collaborative network editing is transforming television and video production. DDN’s SFA architecture enables these users to store all file-based data in one place so that producers can work on it locally and from multiple locations at once. With real-time QoS, users can work concurrently on the same file or on different files, generating hundreds of SD, HD, 2K, 3D and 4K streams for ingest, edit, rendering and playout access all on the same storage pool – without performance degradation or dropping a frame. And for large animation and effects rendering farms that must operate at their peak 24/7, integration between DDN products enables users to offload GRIDScaler jobs from a central location to WOS storage for multisite cloud-based collaboration, global distribution and DR for performance without downtime.

DDN CMO, Molly Rector, said: “Production studios, broadcasters and other customers in the media and entertainment industry are expected to deal with a multitude of issues and tasks associated with big media workflows, including high-performance production, editing, ingest, archive and delivery and more. By leveraging DDN technology with unparalleled performance, ease of management and cost-efficiency for their demanding workflows as part of a highly efficient IT infrastructure, users can create without limitations, collaborate more confidently and shorten time to market.”