Deluxe Digital London Buys Atempo Time Navigator

Atempo, Inc. announced that Atempo Time Navigator has been selected by post-production house Deluxe Digital London to move, manage and protect large digital movie post-production files across its tiered disk and tape-based storage infrastructure.

Deluxe Digital London, whose work includes hit movies such as Quantum of Solace, Atonement, Happy Feet and Beowulf, was looking for an easier way to automatically identify large, individual movie files and move them to the most appropriate storage media for either backup, archive or production purposes.

Peter Guyan, senior systems engineer at Deluxe Digital, said: “A single film in digital format can easily reach a couple of terabytes in size, so we’re dealing with very, very large files. Once a post-production job has been wrapped up, or if a project is put on hold, then that file becomes inactive and we need to move it onto tape. But, the minute we need to work on the file again, we have to be able to get it back onto disk in the quickest, easiest way possible.”

However, moving such large amounts of data to and from disk and tape, while ensuring it was backed up, presented the Deluxe Digital team with a difficult, and often time consuming, challenge.

Deluxe Digital needed a data management solution that could identify individual files and easily backup and restore those files to the most appropriate storage media.

Guyan explains why they chose Atempo Time Navigator: “Other companies in the Deluxe group were already using Atempo Time Navigator so it was a proven, credible option. It also had features that make it especially suitable for the film industry such as the ability to write data to tape in the industry standard TAR per frame format. In addition, Atempo Time Navigator offered excellent integration with the existing SGI solutions that we already had in place.”

When testing Atempo Time Navigator, the Deluxe Digital team was particularly impressed with how easy it was to move inactive data onto tape while maintaining active data on disk. In the future, if a movie is put on hold the Deluxe Digital team can easily and quickly create an archive in Atempo Time Navigator and leave the client data in it for later retrieval, knowing exactly where it is. As soon as that data becomes active again and needs to be restored to disk, Atempo Time Navigator knows where the tape-set is, and how to restore it. Atempo Time Navigator also helps protect Deluxe Digital from data loss by allowing the company to recover quickly in the event of data corruption or in the event that someone accidentally deletes an entire directory on the SAN.

 “We really value the opportunity to collaborate with our customers and to better understand how we can serve the data protection demands of specific industries," said Fabrice de Salaberry, vice president of sales, EMEA at Atempo. "We are really pleased to see Deluxe Digital’s success with Atempo Time Navigator, and we look forward to expanding our ongoing success in the film and broadcast industries with Atempo’s dedicated data protection and archiving solutions."