Media and Entertainment
Storage for the Entertainment Enterprise

Supporting today’s digital video workflow with a monolithic storage strategy is as nostalgic as the VCR. This paper will explore the application of efficient storage – price/performance, redundancy, capacity, and density – to multiple requirements in the widely-varied video ecosystem.

Efficiency in the Entertainment Enterprise

Today’s environment for acquiring, creating, and distributing video is evolving at a faster pace than ever. Supporting these evolving digital asset workflows requires a certain agility of the IT team. Changing user preferences for tools and workflows, new formats, the need to share media across multiple platforms, and expanding requirements for digital asset management – while providing the business continuity and budget efficiency that all video ecosystems need – demand new thinking about storage architectures.

The world of storage is also changing. The ongoing trend of increasing capacity and decreasing cost for hard disk drives (HDDs) is amplified by the revolutionary impact of solid state drives (SSDs) in the enterprise. As user needs evolve and storage architectures undergo radical shifts, it’s important to understand how to match these new capabilities to support your production environment’s needs.

You can now evaluate the requirements for each step in your production workflow and select the right Nexsan storage product for the job at hand

• Powering the work-specific performance demands of the production cycle
• Optimizing for digital asset management requirements around capacity, reliability, and price/performance
• Sharing media across platforms
• Delivering data protection solutions such as backup/restore and disaster recovery

Tuning Storage to your Workflow

The highly-scalable performance and capacity of Imation storage systems provide the instant connections to content that accelerate your workflows, stimulate your operation’s collaboration and creativity, and grow with your operation.

• The Nexsan NST5000 series delivers unified NAS and SAN storage, combining HDDs with FASTier acceleration technology to help optimize price/performance for your workflow. FASTier, Imation’s caching architecture, leverages two types of solid state devices to maximize read/write performance. Many digital production environments start to see performance gains with just a small amount of FASTier cache; scale to multiple TBs if needed. The NST5000 is highly scalable, starting as small as 9TB and expanding to 5PB.
• Nexsan E-Series SAN storage arrays provide the reliability, capacity, and value needed for digital asset storage. Combine SAS and SATA HDDs for industryleading density, delivering up to 240 TB in only 4U of rack space and scaling to multiple petabytes.

This flexibility allows application of the right storage technology to each challenge in the digital production workflow.

Always on, Always Available

With remote production, distributed teams, and compressed schedules, every clip needs to be available to every team member all the time. Highly reliable access is the only standard for today’s digital workflow, no matter where or when the work is being shot and produced.

Nexsan’s approach to designing and delivering enterprise-class storage systems with Nexsan products meets the most demanding needs for high reliability while featuring superior ease-of-use and high value.

E-Series dense, reliable storage for high capacity demands For applications demanding high capacity and reliability while using rack space efficiently, E-Series storage systems bring significant innovations to your production environment

• ActiveDrawer Technology, enabling hot-swappable management of dense storage without powering down the system or running the risk of tipping over the rack
• Cool Drive Technology, our proprietary airflow-optimized chassis design featuring redundant push-pull fans that increases drive cooling and therefore reliability
• Redundancy built into every part of the system, including hot-swappable activeactive controllers, drives, and power supplies keeping your production moving 24x7
• Built-in high-performance replication for business continuity and failover
• A unique chassis design built to dampen HDD rotational vibration, improving production system performance and reliability
• Power savings of up to 85% utilizing AutoMAID energy conservation features, especially useful for nearline digital asset archives

NST5000 Unified Hybrid Storage

When you need to make massive 8k clips or entire HD projects easily available to every member on the team, NST5000 systems deliver high performance and capacity with unsurpassed price/performance metrics. NST5000 systems also feature no-single-point-of-failure reliability with the following features

• Dual redundant storage controllers and power supplies keep the system running 24x7
• Online capacity expansion lets you add drives to the system on the fly without impacting active clients or projects
• Leading performance up to 100,000 ops/sec or 54,000 IOPS
• Leading value as low as $.40/GB including FASTier in a combined performance / capacity configuration
• Manage CIFS/NFS and iSCSI in the same system
• Leverage E-Series systems for backend capacity up to 5PB

Workflow	Requirement	Targeted Solution
Ingest	High sequential write performance for varied file formats	E-Series with SATA drives for capacity and density
Edit/Composite	Fast write and I/O with scalable capacity	E-Series scaling performance and capacity across maximum HDD drives
Render/Transcode	High random I/O performance	NST5000 with FASTier to speed crunching of massive files
Digital Asset Management	Scalable capacity and high reliability	E-Series SAN disk array with redundant activeactive controllers, maximum density and AutoMAID for power management.
Content Delivery	Scalable capacity, high read performance	NST5000 series with FASTier SSD-based storage for activelystreaming files
Replication/ Failover	Replication, affordable capacity, high redundancy	Redundant NST5000 systems with available built-in replication
Backup	Built-in snapshots, good write performance, affordable capacity	E-Series arrays with available built-in snapshots

Changing Workflows, Agile Management

With fast-changing requirements in every aspect of the digital asset ecosystem, flexibility and manageability are essential for IT operations. Imation storage systems are designed to meet the needs of your quickly-scaling data center, with manageability features that give you the control and flexibility to add and move resources when needed. All Nexsan storage products incorporate important manageability features such as

• Ease of installation, with wizards and common-sense system design that make self-service installation fast and intuitive
• Interoperability with any OS environment, including Windows, Mac, Linux and most other flavors of UNIX
• Utilize SSDs with SATA and SAS HDDs in the same system for maximum workflow flexibility
• Storage management tools make reconfiguring your system a snap
• Years of field use with a wide range of content delivery, content production, NLE, and third-party storage management software

Supporting Your Production Environment Transformation

Production technology is advancing at a pace that requires great partnerships with knowledgeable partners. Imation works with a network of experienced, highly-competent storage resellers who specialize in the unique challenges and requirements of the entertainment enterprise. These partners can help you futureproof your architecture to ensure that bringing digital assets to market, from ingest to distribution, is optimized for today and tomorrow.

Media on Nexsan and Axle

If you’re tired of chasing down your media in its many forms, and trying to guess where everything is, request a demo today and see what a truly useful, organized media system can look like. Our NST networked storage solutions integrate axle Gear media management to make all your files accessible, searchable and visible to Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and Avid editors.

A Radically Simple, Powerful Solution

Chances are you’ve got your share of challenges just storing and organizing the files. New material tends to pile up, often with no good way to find, share and collaborate with your colleagues. A shelf full of loose hard drives isn’t the answer, and neither is an expensive, proprietary storage system or MAM.

Introducing a combined solution from Nexsan, for more than a decade the leader in high-density disk storage, and axle Video, the pioneering company that brings you radically simple media management. Store and manage all your media files right on your network, and search and collaborate through a browser interface.

Axle Gear with Nexsan NST comes with everything you need to master your whole media collection. A radically simple, flexible and streamlined solution built to accelerate workflows, enhance collaboration and maximize output.

• Discover - Find the right material, fast. Simple yet powerful search built in.
• Performance - Edit directly from storage with 10GigE, 1GigE and FC connectivity, instead of push-pull copies.
• Collaborate - Keep everyone in the loop and up to date, wherever they are.
• Review - View clips from iPhones, Android and iPads; One-button approval and integrated messages.
• Mobile - Connect with your content anywhere through any web browser or any mobile device.
• Archive - Migrate media to a variety of supported tape, disk and cloud archiving systems.
• Edit - Send selects to all 3 major NLE platforms; optional axle Edit rough-cut iOS editor.
• Browser Based - Modern, sleek user interface - no training. No clunky installers or Java applications.

Start Small- Nearly Unlimited Expansion

Complete systems offering networked storage plus media management starting at an affordable price. NST’s powerful NestOS operating system helps ensure uptime, and fast 10GigE and 1GigE network connections combine with standard SMB and NFS network protocols to guarantee fast, standards-based access.