The Media and Entertainment industry is at the forefront of the shift to an all-digital workflow. As a result IT staff are finding themselves in the role of managing all copies of content from primary copy to archive and everything in between. Immediate content availability is now mandatory due to the proliferation of digital delivery, transcoding requirements and long tail use cases. In addition, archiving content has significantly changed. Digital recording, on hard drives and flash, is now the standard form of initial capture leading to the need for high performance digital methods of long-term preservation that includes detailed customizable metadata. Caringo object storage software powered by CAStor solves these issues by providing massively scalable, high performance storage solutions that keep your content accessible and ensure preservation – for any period of time.
Metadata Driven Control of Your Content and Plug-and-play Scale
Our object storage software is responsive enough to integrate into your workflow and economical enough to use as a long-term archive. You can use standard x86 hardware and any size hard drives with plug-and-play provisioning which makes management, maintenance, and expansion a breeze. Simply plug in new servers to scale both capacity and performance and to easily and automatically migrate data to the latest and most efficient hardware.
- Granular control per object — Metadata is the DNA of digital content. It describes where an object came from, what's in it, who can access it, how it's protected, replicated, and distributed, and how long it is destined to live. CAStor supports customizable metadata and uses it to manage object life cycles from creation to expiration, all without manual intervention.
- Quickly meet any demand — Plug-and-play scale by simply inserting one, or more nodes into the cluster. Additional capacity is automatically available with no manual provisioning required. A single IT administrator can easily add and manage multiple petabytes in a single cluster.
- No file system limitations — Universally unique IDs stored in a flat address space eliminate the complexity of hierarchical file system architectures. There are no limits on quantity of files and no capacity limits. Achieve the performance of primary storage for content of all types, large or small.
- Continuous integrity checks — CAStor's Health Processor continuously monitors data integrity and cardinality (number of replicas) and will automatically heal any degradation or non-conformity. Metadata life point rules are also checks and enforced.
Large Media Company Optimizes Collaboration and Archive
A large film production company needed scalable and economical storage for content being generated by rendering farms. Their current tape-based solution couldn't keep up with the rate of content creation. After looking at scale out NAS and object storage they decided to go with Caringo CAStor.
The Challenge
- Store digital work-in-progress (WIP) content generated during movie production
- Rate of new content being generated daily is exceeding tape system ingest capacity
- Need to have WIP content nearline for easier/faster recall
The Solution
- Object storage with REST interface
The Results
- Ingest capacity of spinning disks provides needed room for growth
- Easily add new storage capacity and more throughput bandwidth
- Similar economics to tape with increased performance and additional functionality
The Configuration
- Two CAStor clusters one in a remote location for improved collaboration and archive
- Content creation workstations and rendering and transcoding server access via HTTP on LAN
