You're watching the game when the announcer notes how one of players has a similar move, shot, or throwing motion as a legend from yesteryear. Within seconds a side-by-side video clip appears on screen showing the similarity between the play that just occurred and a Walter Payton touchdown run, a Michael Jordan three-pointer, or a Greg Maddox curveball for strike three at the knees from thirty or forty years ago.
How'd they do that? Did the production crew have a pre-game meeting to discuss with the announcers which long-since-retired athletes they may reference during the broadcast? Did they just happen to have that moment queued up in the studio as a coincidence? How could a production assistant so quickly identify and access the right clip of the right player performing the right action? Dell EMC PowerScale Isilon nodes and robust metadata are how they did that.
Isilon nodes are powered by the PowerScale OneFS operating system, providing a unified, consolidated storage system to help media and entertainment companies improve the way they create, manage, and deliver their content. Isilon storage nodes are used as hot storage landing zones for media curators such as production studios, editors, and producers at news and sports broadcasting stations, professional sports leagues, and collegiate athletic programs for the massive amounts of data they generate. These and other media and entertainment companies store petabytes of unstructured data including video clips, player highlights, graphic renderings, promos, and rough cuts in addition to entire games. Image the digital space Major League Baseball consumes every season capturing every moment of 162 games for all 32 teams, plus playoffs.
Across the industry, various front-end video editing tools, file formats, and applications are used to organize data—there is no universal standard. Multiple workflows include render, VFX, editing DAM, PAM, MAM, archive, edit playout, scheduling, CDVR, Transcode/Encode, VOD, live, CDN and smart archiving. On the back end, Isilon all-flash nodes address the rapidly increasing security, image availability, performance, and scalability requirements of media and entertainment companies for their Tier 1 storage. Isilon supports the most popular front-end video editing applications and workflows with a low cost per terabyte. In fact, the new PowerScale F200 and F600 nodes are the smallest and lowest cost all-flash and all-NVMe platforms to run PowerScale OneFS–Dell EMC’s industry leading scale-out network attached storage (NAS) software. It is this infrastructure that allows video producers to call up highlights from last week or decades ago in real time, enhancing your viewing experience.
With features such as data deduplication, automated tier-to-tier media migrations, security, advanced metadata management, and encrypted replication—all within a system that is fully scalable and highly efficient—here are five ways Isilon nodes streamline pre and post-production of unstructured data for the media and entertainment industry:
- Increased efficiency and productivity. Supports multiple front-end media access management applications. Producers have preview capabilities, and video clips cached in memory are called up immediately.
- Adaptability to market changes. As technology in the media space evolves, Isilon will evolves with it, supporting 1080p, 4K, and the coming 8K resolution spec, for example.
- Delivering multi-resolution production to multi-platform playout. Get true multiprotocol access to all data at the same time from eight protocols, including NFS, SMB, HDFS, S3, REST, HTTP, NDMP, and FTP. Quickly build graphics, display player intros, and run slow-motion replays at live broadcast speeds.
- Simplified management. Easy to configure, easy to streamline. Minimal learning curves for end users through support for familiar front-end systems.
- Hybrid and Multi-cloud enabled. Move workloads to cloud-based media access management solutions for faster access to data in a targeted geographic region.
As a Dell Technologies Platinum partner, IIS offers expertise in unstructured data systems powered by Dell EMC storage. Together, we can design an Isilon solution that meets your go-to-market requirements with simple, efficient, agile storage solutions that enable you to tell great stories wherever they unfold. Our proven assessment process will help guide you in making the best decision for your organization. Reach out to the IIS sales team for more information.
