June 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
While the number and variety of fi les seems to be exponentially growing, expertise in managing them is still thin on the ground
TVBEurope 27 Workfl ow
TheArk and the file-based flood
LAST YEAR, The Ark installed Quantum’s Lattus-M object storage and appliances to launch a new era in the management of its digital assets. The timing of the installation couldn’t have been better, as the industry hits what seems to be a critical mass in the move to fi le-based workfl ows. The Ark already had a Quantum StorNext data management system. With the addition of Quantum’s Lattus-M, the company will be able to better manage the formidable deluge of fi les moving through the company. Though few would willingly return to a tape-based world, the benefi ts of fi le-based workfl ows have brought with them a host of headaches. Not only are the number of fi les a production creates increasing, the types of fi les are too, and The Ark’s management of these is becoming ever more complex. “We worked on Shuga for MTV,” says The Ark’s CEO, Brendan O’Reilly, “When we did it last year, it was eight formats. We did it again this year, and it was 60 different specs, fi le-sizes and delivery sizes. The reason was the show had to go all throughout Africa to different countries, and each country had their own spec. When it was a tape format, it would play back on the same machine it was recorded on here. If there was an issue with playback, it was easy to resolve.” While the number and variety of fi les seems to be exponentially growing, expertise in managing them is still thin on the ground.
O’Reilly: “It’s only when you start talking to people that you realise the requirements they have”
The Ark heads to America In a room that was once devoted to tape storage, now sits The Ark’s Lattus-M Object store, made up of 20 nodes and three controllers, with a raw capacity of 720TB. In addition, a small RAID, part of the StorNext SAN allows access, providing a big buffer to talk to the object store. It can retrieve a 60-minute HD ProRes fi le from the object store and deliver it to the client PC in two minutes.
Arkive is the company’s library system. The Ark’s new permanent object storage
“It’s a much more robust technology to store your data, as opposed to a traditional RAID system, because you‘ve got a protection model you can build and scale,” says Sejal Patel, IT manager at The Ark, “We’ve got 20 storage nodes. We could lose four complete nodes — they could be completely down — and we could still function.” With the ability to deliver
“Amazon’s
There is a wide variety in the consistency and quality of the fi les The Ark is given to work with. Some fi les are — thankfully — accompanied by meticulously clear metadata and others simply show up unnamed in mysterious formats with attached requests to just “make it work”. Dave Carstairs, technology consultant at The Ark, notes that tape is still not down for the count: “People keep thinking the days of tape are numbered, then suddenly we get in a lot tape work. It’s fairly random. Sometimes people are more comfortable with tape than fi les. It’s more robust for a lot of people. But with fi les there’s a lot more fl exibility.”
Of course, greater fl exibility requires greater
discipline. Loudness
compliance has been the biggest trouble spot for The Ark’s clients, due largely to an unwillingness to learn what loudness standards are all about. “As a result, there’s a lot of cutting and pasting on documentation,” says Carstairs. “People will have listed something as EBU 128, but won’t have actually provided us with a mix that we can make EBU 128.”
great if you have lots of very small fi les. But if you’ve got 20 fi les and they’re all 100 gig each, trying to put those on Amazon Cloud is just not a solution” Dave Carstairs, The Ark
will provide clients with a long-term solution, replacing LTO. And the system is scalable. Says Carstairs: “We can pop the current ones drives out and put in six terabyte drives when they become available.”
fi les anywhere in the world via Signiant or Aspera, and with an expansion of additional storage offsite, The Ark’s new system offers a cloud service for large video fi les. “People in the past might go to Amazon,” says Carstairs. “Amazon’s great if you have lots of very small fi les. But if you’ve got 20 fi les and they’re all 100 gig each, trying to put those on Amazon Cloud is just not a solution. What we can do is deliver for video fi les the same kind of fl exibility that Amazon delivers for document fi les.” With The Ark
expanding its digital storage offerings, has the company’s reach expanded as well?
“It certainly has. We’ve been talking to companies in America about it,” says O’Reilly, “We’ll design a portal where clients can go in and access what they want. It is developing all the time, and it’s only when you start talking to people that you realise the requirements they have.”
London post house, The Ark, partnered with Quantum to install a new object storage system in its Bateman Street facility — just in time for an industry-wide fl ood of fi le-based workfl ows. Neal Romanek reports
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