Premiere Digital Deploys SwiftStack

SwiftStack, Inc. announced that Premiere Digital Services, Inc. is using its software for a more flexible storage and compute workflow that takes advantage of on-premises resources and multi-cloud capabilities.

With this deployment, Premiere Digital is able to move less-demanding workloads off tier 1 storage, burst compute workloads to the public cloud as needed, and increase efficiency when working with remote locations.

As a content aggregator and distributor, Premiere Digital manages and stores millions of digital film and television assets on behalf of major studios, broadcasters, and streaming providers. Its clients need Premiere Digital to deliver content on demand, to anywhere in the world, in formats compatible with more than 600 media platforms. Its Los Angeles, CA, data center perpetually stores over 15PB of content, including massive amounts of metadata, while maintaining 24/7/365 service availability thanks to an additional office in Bangalore, India.

Storing and serving media assets to so many platforms in various formats requires capacity and processing power for ingress, mastering, transcoding, and egress workflows. As the company grew, its existing storage system was unable to keep up with the increased workload and complexity. Premiere Digital searched for ways to consolidate and simplify, and ways to ease the burden on its IT staff of only five.

Key to the deployment was the flexibility to move projects to other resources depending on the need of the workload. Tier 2 storage provides a large working archive behind its media asset manager platform, while production is done on tier 1 hardware and workstations. With SwiftStack, Premiere Digital can achieve a workflow across on-premise, public cloud, and remote locations.

“With our old tier 1 and tier 2 storage, we spent a great deal of time moving data back and forth for different projects,” said Vince Auletta, director of technology, Premiere Digital. “SwiftStack greatly reduces that limitation. Transfers between storage tiers are up to 6x faster than with the old tier 2 system, and now some workflows don’t even need to touch the tier 1, which is even better. Anything that we can do completely in object greatly simplifies things.“

This simplified infrastructure allowed Premiere Digital to move projects that didn’t require low-latency storage off of tier 1 systems, with an added benefit of freeing up 11PB of raw hardware capacity as they migrate data from old systems.

Auletta reports that “a lot of frustration” went into vendor selection for this ambitious storage transformation project, but SwiftStack exceeded the capabilities of all competitors. “It’s really solid, and the performance has been outstanding. It adds time to our day and allows us to churn out a lot more work. SwiftStack has quickly become one of the favorite technologies we use at Premiere, even among the operations teams.“

“Premiere Digital is showing leadership by tackling some challenges common across media companies with their effective deployment of cloud-native storage on-premise,” said Don Jaworski, CEO, SwiftStack. “With their extension into public infrastructure, even at a scale of 20PB and 600 platforms today, their modernized multi-cloud architecture gives them the elasticity and resilience to sustain multiple times that load.“

SwiftStack is a software-defined distributed storage and management system that leverages on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. It can be deployed and scaled by adding standard server hardware on premises and accounts in AWS or Google Cloud Platform. Applications and users are given universal access (file and object) to a single data namespace, and data is placed across the system by user-defined policies. Any amount of metadata can be added and indexed in the system, allowing for full awareness and utilization of valuable business assets.

SwiftStack has highlighted Premiere Digital’s case in a video