Westlake Village Studios Selects SAN Solutions

SAN Solutions, Inc. announced that its Video Production SAN is being used at Westlake Village Studios to provide a truly centralized real-time storage and networking infrastructure. Westlake Village Studios contains a fully equipped, state-of-the-art HDTV production studio and is one of the country’s most technically advanced HD production facilities.

"Westlake Village Studios is an entirely file-based, fully integrated HD production facility that offers everything from shooting to post to broadcast and distribution," said Ryan Cox, director of digital media at Westlake Village Studios. "To support these operations, we needed an open-standards networked storage solution flexible enough to give the entire production team access to the same piece of media and robust enough to maintain a high level of performance even if everyone were to hit that media at once. Any vendor can offer storage capacity, but it’s the latency and bandwidth benchmark – the sustained mixed read/write capability – where other storage systems fail and SAN Solutions succeeds."

SAN Solutions’ high-end Video Production SAN, with a mainframe class of storage infrastructure, stores all media natively in one volume. Users connect over Fibre Channel or via GigE to access the same piece of media without pulling or pushing the files to and from local storage or other playout servers. All of the creative work performed in production refers back to the same piece of media, so there is no need to maintain multiple copies of media other than for archive and backup. As a result, Westlake Village Studios enjoys more efficient storage utilization and has eliminated the complications that can arise when working with numerous copies and versions of media.

The Video Production SAN at Westlake Village Studios supports any of the video formats a customer might request, with the most common being DVCPRO 100. The SAN Solutions system is capable of supporting more than 100 simultaneous, mixed read/write streams hitting the same media at once. This capacity is critical for seamless multicamera editing of the same media across the facility’s production suites. In a six-camera shoot, users at as many as a dozen graphics and/or edit workstations must be able to access all six streams of video without dropping a frame. The Video Production SAN supports this highly efficient collaborative workflow, with headroom to spare. The SAN’s robust design accommodates today’s requirements for 1080i and 1080p, and will allow Westlake Village Studios to work with 2k, 4k, and stereoscopic workflows in the future.

Finally, the flexibility of the SAN Solutions infrastructure allows the facility to assign storage resources to new projects rapidly and dynamically. Whereas it can take some facilities a week to ”reset’ for new jobs, Westlake Village Studios can reconfigure a volume structure or create new folders on the fly to accommodate different bookings without delay. The automatic call-home repair service that accompanies the SAN Solutions system offers peace of mind, with the capacity to identify and address drive issues before the facility’s technical staff becomes aware of them.

"Working with a SAN Solutions system, you can have dinner with your family and go to your kids’ baseball games knowing that the storage supporting your operations will not falter or fail, short of an act of God," added Cox. "You get so used to things working the way they’re supposed to that storage is the last thing on your mind, and that confidence is more valuable than gold."