Superior Business Value of Workflow Over General-Purpose Storage in Media Operations

Quantum Corp. announced that a report by industry analyst Coughlin Associates affirms the superior business value that workflow storage delivers over general-purpose IT storage for broadcast and post-production operations.

Commissioned by Quantum, the report highlights the increasing demands these operations face and identifies three key areas in which intelligent, media-aware storage and content management plays a central role in driving creative and economic ROI. Quantum and the author of the report, Tom Coughlin, discussed the report’s findings at an NAB Show press conferencey, joined by two of the company’s customers, MTI Film and UFC.

Storage in a Changing Media Landscape
The media and entertainment market is undergoing dynamic change at both a technical and business level – from the move to higher video resolutions and capture frame rates to the increased pressure to create more content more quickly and repurpose existing assets. All of this makes the storage infrastructure supporting media production and delivery more critical to a company’s bottom line. As a result, the question of whether to rely on general-purpose IT storage or more specialized workflow storage has taken on greater importance.

Projections for growth on workflow storage

In this market, workflow storage refers to storage optimized for media operations and applications with integrated intelligence that provides application- and media-aware management of content.

According to the Coughlin report, media workflow-optimized storage differs from general-purpose storage “because the demands of moving and streaming large high-resolution media files are quite different from the demands of storing and accessing databases, documents and content created by other common business functions.“

Three Key Types of Value

In its report, Coughlin Associates identifies three key determinants of overall business value in a media production environment in which the choice of storage can have a clear impact:

• Process Value – the benefit of having processes and applications work more efficiently and cost-effectively.
• Creative Value – the benefit of being able to create more content or higher-quality content.
• Content Lifecycle Value – the benefit of being able to control and manage content assets throughout their lifecycle efficiently and profitably, including for re-monetization.

Driving Process Efficiency and Cost Savings
One of the key ways workflow storage drives greater process value is by automatically migrating less frequently accessed content to lower-cost storage layers while seamlessly managing the content regardless of where it sits. In contrast, general-purpose storage often provides only a single tier of storage and, therefore, requires a third-party content management application or even a third-party storage system to deliver the same functionality.

This “can increase the basic cost,” the Coughlin report states.

The report illustrates this point by comparing 3 different cases of storing 500TB of data:
1) general-purpose storage with a single tier of storage;
2) general-purpose storage with a second tier of storage and a third-party content management application to move the data between tiers; and
3) workflow storage with its integrated content management and two layers of storage. As shown in figure below, the workflow storage option offers significant cost savings over the two general-purpose options.

Making Technology a Creative Enabler, Not an Obstacle
As a demonstration of the greater creative value that workflow storage enables, the Coughlin report uses a 4K editing example. With workflow storage, “delivery of video frames to the underlying applications will be deterministic, predictable and 100% accurate,” meaning “this type of storage won’t result in dropped frames.” General-purpose storage, however, “cannot guarantee accurate video frame delivery, which results in dropped frames … causing glitches in video playback, leading to repeated playback and thus delays leading to slower creative work.”

Maximizing Revenue Opportunities for Archived Content
According to the report, “creating an easily navigable, readily retrievable library of content makes the owned content far more valuable, and much more attractive to prospective customers and content licensors, thereby increasing the annuity revenue of managed content … Workflow-optimized storage of content helps you make sure that you can find assets and that the right assets are where they need to be … [while] content owners with a generic storage infrastructure risk missing revenue opportunities due to the inability to locate and retrieve desired content.”

Quantum’s StorNext 5 Platform: Optimized for Media Workflows
Quantum is a long-standing leader in media workflow-optimized storage. Its StorNext 5 platform is a scale-out storage solution that can provide both the performance and low-cost storage in a single managed environment. It combines fast streaming file system and policy-based, end-to-end management for automatically moving content across online storage, extended online storage, tape archive and the cloud, thereby achieving the optimal balance of accessibility and cost based on a user’s needs. StorNext 5 also provides the foundation for StorNext Pro Solutions – systems specially designed to address such challenges as managing 4K content and enhancing legacy Xsan environments.

Tom Coughlin, president, Coughlin Associates, said: “While general-purpose storage can fulfill the basic content storage needs, fashioning a productive workflow without an inherent workflow intelligence doesn’t fully leverage media assets. Workflow-optimized storage, such as Quantum’s StorNext solutions, delivers value throughout the entire production workflow in many ways. It saves time, it eliminates costly human errors and it allows the creative users to focus their valuable time on core creative pursuits that yield more revenue to the organization.”

John Stevens, director of engineering, MTI Film, said: “In today’s post-production environment, you cannot survive unless you make every aspect of your business efficient even while you’re adapting to new project challenges. We move enormous amounts of high-resolution content through our facility, and every second counts. Speed, real collaborative shared access and reliability are critical. StorNext 5 and Lattus extended online keep our workflow at optimum efficiency — there is no way we could do what we do without Quantum.”

Jeff Quinn, director of IT, Ultimate Fighting Championship, said: “The landscape of competition in mixed martial arts changes daily. This is especially true within the UFC where the best in the world come to compete. Quantum’s StorNext and Lattus platforms enable the UFC to quickly build the most dynamic and compelling stories that come along with the best athletes in the world.”