Cloud native storage - a box office hit?

IMT, a Los Angeles-based media asset management company serving the media and entertainment industry, is using the StorageOS platform to provide the persistent storage layer for its flagship SoDA software — the company’s hierarchical storage manager. IMT selected StorageOS from a shortlist of five other vendors, including Portworx, Longhorn, OpenEBS, and Rook. 

SoDA is a state-of-the-art enterprise software application designed to seamlessly manage and automate file movement in and out of the cloud and deliver actionable insight into the OPEX costs of storage and cloud services. Despite the rapid development of cloud-based storage solutions, before SoDA there were no archive storage management technologies available that allowed data to move easily and between different tiers based on rules and policies while tracking costs. This is particularly important in instances where film production companies need to access archived material for later use— as happens with many of today’s biggest film franchises, such as in the Marvel franchise. 

Deployed in the customer data centre, SoDA is a managed software solution and requires a highly available infrastructure. The IMT team decided that running a Kubernetes cluster at the edge as a software target would deliver an effective and resilient infrastructure solution. StorageOS supports this vision by bypassing the need to locally write persistent data. This would have been a high-risk strategy and could have led to data loss in the event of a node failure. Instead, StorageOS provides cloud-native, software-defined storage that delivers persistent storage for Kubernetes. 

“For us, StorageOS delivers the perfect combination between performance and price. Alternative open source solutions would have required us to allocate expensive technical resources to learn about the platform. That person then becomes the sole bottleneck of information, which is less than ideal and didn’t meet our requirements. StorageOS, however, has the support infrastructure in place so that — if there is a problem — I can draw on the deep product knowledge of their experts to put things right,” commented JD Trout, VP, Software Solutions at IMT.

“StorageOS provides IMT with enterprise-class storage offering performance, availability, or security. Thanks to its rapid failover, replication, and market leading performance, StorageOS can meet and exceed the needs of the most demanding storage environments — such as those required by the media and entertainment sector,” said Alex Chircop, Founder and CEO, StorageOS. “When you think about how much money it costs to produce a Hollywood blockbuster, you start to get a sense of the value of the digital files that IMT handles on behalf of their clients. Data loss is not an option, and all files must be available at a moment’s notice — all without incurring unnecessary and avoidable storage-related costs.”

On a broader level, IMT and their customers have benefited from cost, time, and resource savings over previously used solutions. In addition, IMT points towards the StorageOS pricing model, offering the ability to scale cost effectively in a ‘pay as you grow’ structure. “Overall, StorageOS is a joy to work with. We have a storage solution we are confident in, and one of the most important points of all is that the company we are partnering with just ‘gets’ storage,” concluded JD Trout, VP, Software Solutions at IMT.