Qumulo Sees M&E Customers Data Increase

Qumulo, Inc. has seen an increase in both the file data needs of M&E customers and in customer adoption.

The company is managing more than 1EB of data and more than 235 billion files for customers around the world.

Customers create over 1 billion files and perform over 200 billion operations each day, 90% of which take less than 1ms to execute. With 7 of the top 10 M&E companies leveraging Qumulo, the company saw growth in customer adoption as the industry adopts cloud and virtual collaboration.

Studios including Industrial Brothers, Cinesite, Jam Filled Entertainment and FuseFX use Qumulo to produce television shows, animated feature films and world-renowned VFX projects, such as the James Bond franchise, the Avengers and American Horror Story.

M&E companies are grappling with the growing demand for producing high-quality digital content. According to a recent report by Research and Markets, over 116EBs of new digital storage will be used for digital archiving and content conversion and preservation by 2025.

Advancements in computer imaging for visual effects and animation as well as the increasing popularity of 4K UHD content are driving the need for massive storage. The report also states that producers are experimenting with innovative methods for cinematography that require rendering terabytes of raw footage, making it essential to have the ability to scale up as needed over the course of a production period.

The past year produced a new set of challenges for M&E enterprises. Creative teams around the world had to quickly pivot their business strategies by shifting production processes from on-premises to remote platforms, ensuring animation and creativity were not impacted by infrastructure limitations, all while increasing collaboration and productivity to ensure business deadlines weren’t missed.

“Since moving our storage infrastructure over to Qumulo, we no longer need to have someone dedicated to storage. It becomes a shared role that a few people in our team can help with,” said Jason Burnard, IT director, Guru Animation Studio Ltd. “As our studio grows, we love that we do not need to re-think our storage solution, it’s simple enough to pop another node in the cluster. To expand the cluster, we just scale it up!“

Studios are turning to Qumulo for support throughout the data lifecycle of creative work streams, storing petabytes of raw footage and animation sequences while managing virtual collaboration in the cloud. Even as special effects, animation, and HD capabilities continue to rapidly advance, The vendr provides data access to streamline creativity and collaboration. Robust management, storage, and protection for petabyte levels of HD, 4K, and 8K content across cloud environments provide support and visibility for billions of files. By enabling this radical simplicity, customers can scale to advance editorial and video production workflows and keep creative productivity on track and meet media production deadlines.

“The post-production schedule provides a very short timeline to create quality effects,” said Farnia Fekri, director of marketing, Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies (MARZ) . “We chose Qumulo because its software allows us to deliver higher quality visual effects on a shorter timeline, and ensures that we fulfill our promise to our customers.“

The Qumulo File Data Platform, meets the needs of in-house and remote creative teams by providing dynamic scalability, increased efficiency and cost savings:

• Animation studio Industrial Brothers went from downtime of almost 2,000 annual labor hours, to zero downtime by switching to Qumulo File Data Platform – saving approximately $80,000 a year.
• Jam Filled Entertainment, a division of Boat Rocker Media Inc. and a Canadian animation studio known for its work with Nickelodeon, realized its IT service was receiving more than 780 uptime and performance-related support tickets a year with its prior system. By moving to Qumulo, Jam Filled reduced that number to zero. Its animation studio improved user productivity, safeguarded customer deadlines, and minimized stress as a result of vendor’s reliability and performing platform.
• VFX studio FuseFX, which creates visual effects for popular productions like American Horror Story and The Flight Attendant, leveraged Qumulo Cloud Q to render 32,000 core frames across 1,000 machines in under an hour. FuseFX now uses Qumulo as a long-term solution for fast, clustered storage management.

“Qumulo is leading a data revolution in the M&E industry. We are helping the world’s leading creative teams including animators, visual effects creators and post production teams, evolve and transform their businesses to deliver the highest quality projects,” said Ben Gitenstein, VP of product, Qumulo. “By providing a modern infrastructure that can scale to meet the most demanding performance requirements, our customers can focus on accelerating innovation and increasing collaboration, knowing that the leader in this market is helping them manage, store and protect EBs of file data, whether they have on-prem or cloud environments.“

Qumulo Enables M&E Customers to:

• Integrate with existing applications leveraging the File Data Platform. File system creates a single pool of storage which supports SMB and NFS file protocols.
• Dynamically scale with Qumulo Scale, to serve petabytes of content on-prem and cloud to support collaboration, post production, file sharing, burst rendering, and/or storage/archive.
• Utilize company’s all-NVMe or hybrid flash-first platforms, which enable flash-first writes and predictive caching to ensure the data needed is always rapidly available. Low latency and fast performance accelerate collaboration, creativity, management, and delivery.
• Optimize creative environments through simplified resource management and cost reduction with real-time analytics.
• Leverage multi-protocol support and permission management for mixed SMB/NFS environments where the workflows utilize asset management platforms and non-linear editing systems on the same shared data.
• Editorial and video production workflows with remote collaboration, enabling both production and editorial teams to maintain performance across multiple remote locations.
• Leverage cloud-native software to allow creative teams the ability to work anywhere, providing multiple editors and artists the opportunity to read-write and transform data across protocols, locations, and applications with scalability, speed and reliability.
• Distribute file data globally with ease. Editors and animators can ingest raw content and footage directly from many types of applications directly to Qumulo and publish the data for people to use across multiple regions and various machines including Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Resources:

• Qumulo for M&E
• eBook: Keeping Creativity Flowing with a Hybrid Environment (registration required)