Thought Equity Motion Opts for Isilon NAS

Isilon Systems announced that Thought Equity Motion, Inc., in digitizing, delivering and monetizing high-quality video content, has deployed Isilon scale-out NAS to power its rendition generation workflow, accelerating the transcoding of up to 200,000 files per week.

With Isilon IQ, featuring its OneFS operating system, Thought Equity Motion has unified its transition, proxy and preview files onto a single, high performance, highly scalable, shared pool of storage, accelerating the transcoding of these files into a wide variety of media formats for customers including BBC Motion Gallery, HBO, NBC News, the NCAA and The New York Times. Using Isilon scale-out NAS, Thought Equity Motion has expanded its rendition pipeline to process more projects in less time, speeding time-to-delivery, while requiring less than one full-time equivalent (FTE) to manage the solution.

"Our managed services drive monetization for our media customers by making their content accessible across a wide range of access points and delivery models," said Mark Lemmons, CTO, Thought Equity Motion. "So of course, the ability to quickly and effectively transcode content into multiple formats is critical to our business and demands a high performance, highly reliable storage solution. Isilon is that solution – an easy to use storage resource that scales on-demand to accelerate our operations, while reducing costs."

Thought Equity Motion provides managed services including asset management, digitization, backup, metadata management, curation and delivery for media companies and content rights holders, as well as content services for publishers and digital content producers. Prior to deploying Isilon scale-out NAS, the complexity, time-intensive management and rising costs associated with Thought Equity Motion’s traditional SAN system limited the performance of its rendition generation workflow, slowing project turnaround and increasing IT costs. With the need to transcode and store up to 18 terabytes (TB) of content per day, Thought Equity Motion needed a storage solution capable of cost-effectively scaling to meet increasing market demand and speed delivery of its managed Services.

Working with leading Isilon channel partner Datalink, Thought Equity Motion deployed the Isilon IQ X-Series and two Isilon IQ Accelerator performance expansion nodes to create a unified storage resource for all of its transcoding operations. By using Isilon IQ to power its rendition generation workflow, Thought Equity Motion has been able to better utilize its traditional SAN system, leveraging this resource for high-performance content ingest operations thereby maximizing the value of Thought Equity Motion’s existing storage infrastructure. Additionally, as Isilon IQ requires less than one FTE to manage, Thought Equity Motion has been able to reallocate valuable IT resources to higher order priorities, driving increased operating leverage across its business.

"In today’s media industry, content is king and the ability to monetize content is critical to business success," said Sam Grocott, vice president of marketing, Isilon Systems. "Thought Equity Motion is delivering faster, more efficient and more effective ways to maximize the value of media assets and its use of Isilon IQ to accelerate its reduce costs and speed project time-to-delivery is another example of the compelling benefits Isilon scale-out NAS delivers for the next generation of media."