Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/256420
6 • Storage Solutions • March 2013 STORAGE SOLUTIONS to consider expansion possibilities. "What we have now should last for years: Every year hard drives get bigger and cheaper. We're now buying 3TB hard drives, but we could replace them with bigger drives and instantly gain more capacity; we can mix different drive sizes with no other configuring. We could effectively double our storage space with every new generation of drives. Or we could just add another." TRICON FILMS & TV Tricon Films & TV (www.triconfilms.com) in Toronto does "it all, from conceptualizing series to distributing them — and everything in between," says IT manager Chris McLaughlin. The company produces long-form TV and documentary features; its Ex-Wives of Rock has just been renewed for a second season and its US coproduc- tion, Nadia G's Bitchin' Kitchen, is in season two of the on- line process at Tricon. "For the longest time we acquired everything on tape or disk," says McLaughlin. "Now that we're almost exclu- sively using the Canon C300, Panasonic AF100 and Pana- sonic GH3s, we can no longer grab a tangible storage device from a shelf; everything goes to hard drive arrays and LTO tape and has to stay on the arrays for the dura- tion of the cut." In the last two years Tricon went from requiring 10TB of storage to approximately 100TB of storage — and its pre- vious NAS solutions are still in use. "Our storage require- ments increased enormously," McLaughlin notes. "We had looked at a lot of solutions in the past. Some had prob- lems, some had very little track record, some had costs we couldn't justify. Then a former colleague, who is now a reseller, told me about Rorke." Rorke Data's Strawberry server piqued his interest. McLaughlin checked out online demos and decided that it would fit Tricon's existing workflow. He met with Rorke reps and felt that a Galaxy Aurora array with Strawberry server would deliver "the best bang for the buck." So the company installed a Galaxy Aurora array with 72TB of raw storage and 60TB of usable storage. "The beauty of the Aurora is that it's highly configurable, so put a Straw- berry server on top of it and you have a fast, large and cost- effective video server," McLaughlin says. "One of the system's top-selling features was its speed. We have 16 Avid Media Composers in offline suites and need every megabit we can get out of the Aurora." Thanks to multi-camera shoots an offline editor may be working with footage from "upwards of nine cameras at any one time — all high-res. We work at full resolution in offline then transcode to DNx for finishing on Nitris," he explains. "So we need throughput to support nine high-resolution feeds with no problem. With all our broadcast deadlines, Strawberry helped us deliver on time, every time." McLaughlin gives kudos to the "totally expandable" na- ture of the system. But the current solution should last for a while. When he ordered the Rorke, McLaughlin "took into account everything shot on cards, instead of tape or disk, and calculated the storage requirements. I got roughly 40TB for a production season with everything online at high resolution at any time. Then I added another 50 per- cent for overhead. I figured that should hold us until we double our size." That sounds like a good, long time, but Tricon has been in expansion mode for the last few years. "Every year we get busier," McLaughlin reports. "But even if we get an increase in production for our post department, it will be a drop in the bucket to increase our capacity for our current storage arrangement, which is the idea: to keep our costs down and productivity uninterrupted." ENCORE HOLLYWOOD With Encore Hollywood's already substantial list of tele- vision programming growing daily, the noted post house (www.encorehollywood.com) found itself needing more high bandwidth and another tier of redundancy for file storage, says VP of engineering Jay Bodnar. A fan of NetApp Ex-Wives of Rock: In the last two years Tricon went from requiring 10TB of storage to about 100TB of storage. Storage Supplement 2013RAV10FINAL READ.indd 6 2/28/13 10:33 AM