Advancements for SwiftStack’s Object Storage

SwiftStack, Inc. announced that top media and entertainment organizations and technology tool providers are unlocking incremental value by using company’s Object Storage in media production workflows.

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When used with SwiftStack, media asset management (MAM) solutions offer new levels of access and protection for improved productivity. Using it, media producers also achieve predictive and affordable cost at scale without the need for additional expertise, enabling them to focus on the creativity that makes them unique.

“The media and entertainment industry is increasingly collaborative, and as a result media producers require storage that is more accessible throughout their production ecosystem and more compatible with the applications and tool-sets they use,” said Joe Arnold, president and chief product officer, SwiftStack. “SwiftStack is a new breed of object storage designed to give media producers the scale and offsite protection of cloud with the performance and reliability of private storage, in a package that does not require storage experts.“

Vizrt, a provider of content production, management and distribution tools for the digital media industry, is among the solution providers that are realizing benefits from using a SwiftStack-enabled architecture.

“The Vizrt partnership with SwiftStack is about providing the new breed of private cloud and object storage to our MAM platform customers,” said Francois Laborie, chief commercial officer, Vizrt. “Beyond basic toolset integration, we see strategic collaborative opportunities that enable new workflows and architectures using SwiftStack’s intelligent and expandable storage capabilities in conjunction with Viz One’s deep asset management feature set.“

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SwiftStack empowers accelerated post-production and delivery operations where storage has become a bottleneck. Without changing their preferred software tools or applications, company’s Object Storage enables media creators and producers with performance, scale and accessibility not available using traditional disk storage or tape media. Key company’s Object Storage advantages include:

• Improved productivity – Editors and users can get to work faster by accelerating footage ingestion in parallel across the unified storage pool. During media delivery, company’s Object Storage is also much more efficient, with far less infrastructure required.

• Unlimited access – The architecture excels among object storage platforms at storing massive volumes of layered assets in an active archive, where file-based workflows can often break. This means studios and distribution networks can scale-out access independently and on the fly.

• Distributed protection – Built-in redundancy protects valued media assets with cloud durability. Data can be geographically distributed across multiple sites so assets are closer to the user for improved user experience and offsite protection.

• Simplified management – Company’s controller automates the management activities that can consume time and expertise so studio technical staff is free to focus on more strategic processes. Intuitive management requires no storage expertise.

• Freedom of choice for lower TCO – SwiftStack is delivered using cost-efficient standard hardware and open software, without being constrained by vendor lock-in. This means that proprietary hardware is never required, which results in the lowest acquisition cost and a low, predictable operating cost as storage grows.

Company’s Object Storage is in use by a number of animators, post-production houses, media content distribution and delivery networks, broadcasters and media SaaS providers. Among them is live sports broadcaster Pac-12 Networks.

“During our busy season alone, our storage nodes accumulate 12TB of data per weekend. We needed a storage and archive platform that enables us to scale linearly and infinitely while simplifying how we manage our data,” said Scott Adametz, director, system architecture and technology, Pac-12 Networks. “With SwiftStack, we’re able to seamlessly deliver hours of rich media content without interruption and scale as our content grows. With the help of SwiftStack I had my architecture running in five minutes, allowing my team to focus on increasing the program count each year, while completely trusting our back-end storage platform.“