DataDirect Networks and ASG partner

A large international Media & Entertainment Post Production company was facing problems handling very large amounts of data including movies, documentaries, trailers, etc. The company needed to be able to archive data at very high speeds, secure it in different locations and retrieve it quickly for post-production requirements. Any of the video sequences also had to be available to editors when requested, even during peak times and off-hours. The company turned to DDN and ASG for a high performance, high availability active archive and collaboration solution, that in the future can also address the company's need to access geographically distributed data.

The fully integrated DDN and ASG solution is based on ADA, an open archive software solution, and WOS distributed object-based storage technology. The WOS-ADA solution leverages ADA archiving and data movement capabilities in conjunction with the WOS appliance's web-scale storage capabilities, high performance read/write abilities, efficient disk utilization and geographic replication. The result is a huge archive platform that archives billions of files and performs at 5.8 TB/hour. The post production company is equipped with 8 WOS Nodes offering a total of 720TB of storage and an ADA archiving platform powered by two 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 1.7GB/s per ADA data mover.

DDN and ASG worked together to integrate ADA with WOS technology which capitalizes on the high capacity of affordable storage and fast performance data movement. 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. Advanced ADA features essential to media and entertainment post production are also available, such as the partial retrieval of MXF (media files), so editors can retrieve quickly a sequence or a group of frames directly without needing to retrieve the whole movie/file.

"These systems are highly complementary and seamlessly leverage the WOS API and ADA's REST interface. Today, our customers are benefitting from the expanded storage archiving functionality this new solution provides," says Armel Bile, ASG-Digital Archive Product Manager.

"Our integrated solution represents the best of breed in active archiving and is built and designed for the very high performance archiving needs of today's media and entertainment post production houses. The WOS-ADA solution gives customers all the functionality and collaboration they need with the speed of a high performance, hard disk-based platform but with a cost closer to that of tape," said Michael King, DDN Director of Product Marketing.