SUCCESS STORY

DELUXE ENTERTAINMENT SERVICES GROUP IS A LEADING PROVIDER OF STATE-OF-THE-ARTservices and technologies for the global digital media and entertainment industry. From start to fi nish and in whatever format or language, Deluxe provides the technology, talent and high-quality processes to assist a broad range of customers around the world, including major motion picture studios, television networks, cable companies, advertising agencies, production companies, independent distributors and content owners.

Deluxe Creative Services, through its respective Company 3, EFILM, Method Studios and Beast brands, handles post-production processing and is home to one of the largest pools of colorists and visual eff ects specialists in the industry. Deluxe Creative Services has played an important role in many acclaimed fi lms.

According to Phil Mendelson, CTO for Deluxe Creative Services, teams in Los Angeles, New York, London, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Vancouver and various virtual sites work together seamlessly to address all aspects of fi lm post-production. “We provide services anywhere in the world where production is shooting, so it’s very common for us to push content from L.A. and pull it from London,” he explains. “Ensuring fast turnaround by automating data movement throughout the post-production lifecycle is key to delivering content whenever and wherever it’s needed.”

THE CHALLENGE

To better manage feature-fi lm workfl ow across its global footprint, Deluxe Creative Services sought an improved architectural underpinning that would enable selectively replicating data globally for easy and fast access by remote users. Numerous challenges surfaced in meeting this objective, including varied fi lmmaking process needs and the massive amounts of data generated.

Workfl ows start at camera capture with daily services and extend to digital Intermediate (DI) fi nishing of color, images and sound. Typically, workfl ow data is ingested and stored on tier-one disk storage while proxies are created and archived on tape-based storage to be parsed out to directors, producers, visual eff ects teams, marketing and a host of stakeholders for review and editing. As data doesn’t always come in the same way, Deluxe demands great fl exibility in how it’s stored, accessed, shared and retained.

Additionally, projects moving through post-production create massive storage requirements. Typical feature fi lms produce 300-to-500TB of raw camera masters, with up to 50MB per frame, depending on format. The amount of content doubles with 3D shows and ongoing demand for ultra high-defi nition resolution means that data sizes continue to grow exponentially. “Not only are we dealing with extremely large amounts of content, we have stringent expectations for fast turnaround,” adds Mendelson. “We need to archive data at very high speeds and then retrieve it quickly from any location, even during peak times and off hours.”

CHALLENGES

• Increasing demand to access and share high resolution post-production workfl ow content on a global scale

• Massive storage requirements and rapid growth created surge of Big Data

• Legacy tape-based archives proved insuffi cient in meeting fast turnaround and high performance throughput expectations

SOLUTION

WOS® Object Storage and ADA Solution that includes 8 WOS Nodes and an ADA archiving platform powered by four data movers

RESULTS

• Seamless fl ow between traditional fi le systems, object storage and tape across multiple facilities and geographies to to keep production workfl ows on track, shorten production time, and avoid pitfalls in the fi lmmaking process

• Optimal storage backend to proprietary automated transcoding engine

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ACCELERATE:MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT

DDN Storage Accelerates Deluxe Entertainment Post-Production

Workfl ow with High Performance, Massively Scalable & Cost-Eff ective

Active Archiving Platform

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With DDN and ASG, we’ve found

a solution that capitalizes on the

high capacity of affordable object

storage and fast data movement

to change our definition of

archiving.

Phil MendelsonCTO, Deluxe Creative Services

Object storage was appealing as

a solution where we could very

quickly get data in and out of

archive. With this kind of active

archive we could make data

instantly available to anyone,

anywhere as local content.

Traditionally, Deluxe Creative Services relied entirely on an LTO tape-based archive to warehouse all camera masters for a particular project, even though this process was slowed by the administration required to manually pull and mount tapes. As delivery demands increase, concern grew that having tape archives on location wasn’t a sustainable model because throughput of up to 120MB per drive was insufficient. “We really needed to achieve a much higher level of throughput—in excess of hundreds of megabytes per second,” says Mendelson. “It became apparent that trying to do daily pulls from a tape-based architecture would present a real roadblock going forward.”

While going to a model where all content was housed on spinning disks would give Deluxe the throughput required, this option came with its own challenges. When maximum throughput was an issue, Deluxe used conventional SAN storage, but this was an expensive alternative that wouldn’t scale sufficiently over time. “The traditional model of local SAN storage wouldn’t scale out to a global footprint,” adds Mendelson. “Using NAS storage to move content from New York to London also would be too slow, leading to performance bottlenecks. What we needed was a different type of archive for handling really big media with big throughput.”

THE SOLUTION

In evaluating its high-performance archiving requirements, Deluxe Creative Services saw object storage as a potential fit for handling all creative assets generated during post production. By design, object storage boasts a simpler architecture than its SAN and NAS counterparts, making it well suited for building scale-out platforms to support large volumes of this kind of unstructured data. “Performance was a big consideration as we knew we couldn’t achieve it easily with any off-the-shelf public cloud solutions,” Mendelson says.

After surveying the competitive landscape, Deluxe felt that the object storage approach taken by DataDirect™ Networks (DDN) offered a powerful solution for housing petabytes of data associated with all its creative assets. “DDN’s WOS object storage platform was a lot cleaner than competing solutions,” adds Mendelson. “With WOS, we could easily scale out a global cluster with nodes anywhere in the world.” To maximize performance, DDN architected WOS without an underlying file system, resulting in “pure” object architecture that is optimized for low latency, fast access, geographically distributed clouds and web applications. With its ability to support petabyte-scale repositories, WOS is ideal for highly reliable, online collaboration and “active” archive applications. Another distinct advantage for DDN was a partnership the company had forged with ASG Software Solutions to deliver an integrated active archive solution featuring WOS and ASG-Digital Archiving (ADA).

The ASG-Digital Archive is an open archive software solution that moves and preserves massive volumes of digital content into the WOS storage platform with automatic, end-user, application-driven or workflow-triggered archiving. Together, the WOS-ADA solution takes advantage of ADA archiving and data movement capabilities along with the WOS appliance’s high-scale storage capabilities, high performance read/write abilities, efficient disk utilization and geographic replication.

BUSINESS BENEFITS

• A cohesive infrastructure that provides high-reliability storage and fast data movement that exceeds the rigorous requirements of major motion picture studios

• With DDN’s object storage platform, content sharing and collaboration can be achieved more economically across a global footprint

• The ability to replicate content selectively ensures meeting stringent deadlines without worry over missing shots or problems with version control

• Optimize and relieve pressure on expensive tier-one SAN storage

SHOOT

SAN

DAILIES EDITORIAL VFX/DI DISTRIBUTION

ADADATAMOVER

ADADATAMOVER

ADACATALOG

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For Deluxe, pairing DDN’s economical scale-out object storage and ASG’s automated data movement with its own internal metadata tracking system would make it easier and faster to distribute and retrieve content according to editing decisions. “The twinkle in our eye was the opportunity to build something totally integrated that would give us a unified system for managing post-production workflows,” says Mendelson. “We didn’t want high-level users worrying about which volume or file system contained their content, so the solution had to be simple yet powerful enough to meet our performance demands.”

Another plus in DDN’s favor was its proven partnership with Deluxe as DDN® storage was a mainstay in other parts of the Deluxe organization. “DDN engineers and salespeople really know their stuff and their product understanding goes well beyond how it works to include different use cases and real-world scenarios where the technologies can be applied best,” notes Mendelson. “There’s been a high level of collaboration between us and DDN over the years, so we knew they wouldn’t try to shoehorn their technology into a less than ideal application.”

THE BENEFITS

Following a successful proof of concept validating WOS and ASG technology, Deluxe Creative Services began deploying the complementary solutions. “DDN and ASG offer the best technology in their respective fields, so we’re confident our integrated solution will represent the best-of-breed in active archiving and fast data movement,” Mendelson says. “As we roll out the deployment, we’ll bring all the elements together in a single, tightly integrated solution.”

In rolling out its integrated content repository system, Deluxe Creative Services is finding it easier to keep production workflows on track, shorten production time, and avoid pitfalls in the filmmaking process. As part of the deployment, the company is implementing eight WOS nodes and an ADA archiving platform powered by four data movers. ADA is collecting data on shared storage and then creating multiple archiving streams to store data on the WOS storage platform at a pace of 1.7 GB/s per ADA data mover.

The integrated platform also delivers short-term storage with backup capacity and long-term archiving capabilities that support the preservation of data with its associated user metadata. “With DDN and ASG, we’ve found a solution that capitalizes on the high capacity of affordable object storage and fast data movement to change our definition of archiving,” adds Mendelson.

As WOS nodes are deployed around the globe, Deluxe anticipates a boost in productivity at each location because finding content is much easier and requires less effort. Additionally, performance throughput is meeting all expectations while administrative overhead is considerably less than the company’s legacy tape-based approach. “We’re getting great throughput on our WOS platform,” says Mendelson. “Bandwidth rivals what we get on a tier-one SAN but at a much lower total cost of ownership.”

In the future, Deluxe Creative Services expects additional cost savings by freeing up expensive, tier one, SAN storage for those applications requiring the highest levels of real-time performance like increased frame rates and higher resolution. Wherever else, WOS provides ample performance, scalability, flexibility and reliability in one platform that doesn’t force them to constantly move workflow data across multiple tiers of storage.

Additionally, WOS provides Deluxe with high-reliability storage as the platform offers a choice of data protection capabilities, including ObjectAssure™, which provides local, replicated and globally distributed erasure coding to safeguard data at multiple locations from site failures. “We’re under a lot of pressure to turn materials around rapidly, so we need maximum uptime and data availability,” explains Mendelson. “WOS provides a disaster recovery copy that we can replicate selectively, giving us an active DR site for an extra level of protection.”

With WOS, Deluxe will scale its global footprint as needed simply by adding nodes online, which holds a lot of value for the rapidly growing company. “We’re always expanding, so we expect to see WOS grow to 6 PBs pretty quickly,” concludes Mendelson. “DDN is helping us build a model that is as effective as SAN storage but far more economical and scalable—I believe object storage is the future of network storage.”

TECHNICAL BENEFITS

• Integrated content repository streamlines distribution and retrieval of content according to editing needs

• Choice of data protection capabilities safeguards data with very high durability and availability at multiple locations

ABOUT DDN®

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world’s leading big data storage supplier to data-intensive, global organizations. For more than 15 years, DDN has designed, developed, deployed and optimized systems, software and solutions that enable enterprises, service providers, universities and government agencies to generate more value and to accelerate time to insight from their data and information, on premise and in the cloud. Organizations leverage the power of DDN technology and the deep technical expertise of its team to capture, store, process, analyze, collaborate and distribute data, information and content at largest scale in the most efficient, reliable and cost effective manner. DDN customers include many of the world’s leading financial services firms and banks, healthcare and life science organizations, manufacturing and energy companies, government and research facilities, and web and cloud service providers. For more information, visit our website www.ddn.com or call 1-800-837-2298.

©2015 DataDirect Networks. All Rights Reserved. DataDirect Networks, the DataDirect Networks logo, DDN, ObjectAssure, Web Object Scaler & WOS are trademarks of DataDirect Networks. Other Names and Brands May Be Claimed as the Property of Others.

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