Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/57245
STORAGE SOLUTIONS Data, dataeverywhere A t the heart of the infrastructure for anyone doing high-volume, data-intensive post production today, storage systems are key to throughput, speed and workflow integration. Choosing the right storage solution for the application is critical to success as facilities and inde- pendent editors attest. dedicated data wrangler for daily housekeeping." Creative Post has been a Facilis customer since 2004. It had one TerraBlock of its own, acquired a second when it took over a competing facility, then bought a third unit as busi- ness grew upgrading all systems to 64-bits and integrating them on fibre. The company handles a large volume of cable reality shows for the Canadian and US mar- kets, which make constant use of the stor- age systems. Post for feature films — in- cluding an increasing amount of 2K stereo 3D post — and TV drama is done in suites not attached to the TerraBlocks; they use proprietary storage and a centralized SAN. MacNeil says the TerraBlocks "are a very workable solution for our mid-grade TV programming. We can grow them as need- ed, but the Canadian market is only so big so we're at a comfortable size right now." MacNeil admits, however, that his fast- Creative Post's Ken MacNeil: a large part of the studio's work is reality TV. CREATIVE POST One of the largest independent post production facilities in Canada, Toronto's Creative Post (www.creativepostinc. com) uses a trio of 48TB Facilis TerraBlock 24Ds for central- ized shared storage for its TV post division. The TerraBlocks support seven Apple Final Cut Pro rooms and four Avid Symphony suites where programs are con- formed; they also support the company's DI suites for ease in moving feature film and high-end TV programming files from conforming to color correction, mastering, DCP cre- ation or Blu-ray encoding. "Everyone in our facility can get to the TerraBlocks, so there's a big ease of use factor," says Creative Post president Ken Mac- Neil. "The systems require very little maintenance: You can fill them up and nothing really happens, where a SAN takes a 4 • Storage Solutions • March 2012 growing global DI and stereo 3D business, including Imax 3D, is definitely SAN-ori- ented. "I'm not a huge fan of SANs: They take a tremendous amount of housekeep- ing to keep them running at top perfor- mance. But we also need the huge output speeds they deliver." So Creative Post is likely to continue with a two-pronged ap- proach to storage for the foreseeable future. MODERN VIDEOFILM At Modern VideoFilm (www.mvfinc.com), all three of Harmonic's Omneon MediaGrid active storage products, which combine clustered storage with grid computing, come into play. "The 1000 series provides inbound and outbound stor- age for all of our Burbank content delivery operations," says senior engineer Bill Womack. "A MediaGrid 2000 is working storage for ingest, transcoding and editorial. "The MediaGrid 1000 and 2000 systems are true clustered storage, so they have replication of data within them; they're very fast and reliable," he reports. "The 3000 is a RAID-based system that offers more usable space per dollar. It's deployed See www Finding the right storage fit for your workflow is critical. By Christine Bunish