Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1334761
STORAGE www.postmagazine.com 27 POST JAN/FEB 2021 OPENDRIVES RECEIVES FUNDING FOR GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT LOS ANGELES — OpenDrives, Inc. (www.opendrives.com), the provider of enterprise-grade, hyper-scalable network-attached-storage (NAS) solutions has raised up to $20 million in Series B funding. Led by IAG Capital Partners, the latest announcement brings the company's total capital raised to $30 million, which it will use to grow the company and accelerate product development. In 2020, OpenDrives released three new product series, and a fully customizable NAS hardware platform, supported by a re-designed Atlas software release. "Every innovation in our company has been powered by anticipating our customers' needs, whether it was creating storage capacity to handle the first 6K film, bringing portable studios to live global broadcast or ac- celerating remote capabilities when COVID-19 forced customers into a work-from-home environment," explains David Buss, chief executive officer of OpenDrives. "Although our core DNA is in providing on-premise storage solutions, we're backed by dynamic team expertise and investment partners who all share our bold vision for enabling the next generation of compute storage in delivering a more holistic solution to the industry." "We've continued to refine and optimize our hardware and software infrastructure, while always keep- ing our eye on the cloud, because our team develops solutions that prioritize customer needs over market trends," adds Sean Lee, chief strategy and product officer at OpenDrives. "Over the last 24 months, long before the pandemic, we saw ways to harness the power of the cloud to work for our clients without sacri- ficing performance or becoming cost-prohibitive. This represents a landmark in our ability to serve enterprise clients. Support from IAG Capital Partners will only accelerate this." OpenDrives was founded in 2011 in an effort to meet the technical challenges director David Fincher (Mank, Mindhunter, The Social Network, Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) faced in post production. Those challenges centered around speed, latency and scalability. to monetize archival content. SCALABILITY AND MANAGEMENT Organizations must commit significant staff and resources to manage and grow an LTO tape library. Due to their physical complexity, these libraries can be difficult and expensive to scale. In the age of streaming, broadcasters are increasing their content at breakneck speed. And with the adoption of capacity-intensive formats like 4K, 8K and 360/VR, more data is being created for each piece of content. Just several hundred hours of video in these advanced formats can easily reach a petabyte in size. In LTO environments, the only way to increase capacity is to add more tapes, which is particularly difficult if there are no available library slots. When that's the case, the only choice is to add anoth- er library. Many M&E companies' tape libraries already stretch across several floors, leaving little room for expansion, especially because new content (in high- er resolution formats) tends to use larger data quantities than older content. Object storage was designed for limitless scalability. It treats data as objects that are stored in a flat address space, which makes it easy to grow deployments via horizontal scaling (or scaling out) rather than vertical scaling (scaling up). To increase a deployment, organizations simply have to add more nodes or devices to their existing system, rather than adding new systems (such as LTO libraries) entirely. Because of this, object storage is simple to scale to hundreds of petabytes and beyond. With data continuing to grow exponentially, especially for video content, being able to scale easily and efficiently helps M&E companies maintain order and visibility over their content, enabling them to easily find and leverage those assets for new opportunities. Increasing the size of a sprawling, messy tape library is exactly the opposite. Tape libraries also lack centralized management across locations. To access or manage a given asset, a user has to be near the library where it's physically stored. For M&E organizations that have tape archives in multiple locations, this causes logistical issues, as each separate archive must be managed individually. As a result, companies often need to hire multiple administrators to operate each archive, driving up costs and causing operational siloing. Object storage addresses the chal- lenge of geo-distribution with central- ized, universal management capabilities. Because the architecture leverages a global namespace and connects all nodes together in a single storage pool, assets can be accessed and managed from any location. While companies can only access data stored on tape directly through a physical copy, object storage enables them to access all content re- gardless of where it is physically stored. One person can administer an entire globally-distributed deployment, enforc- ing policies, creating backup copies, pro- visioning new users and executing other key tasks for the whole organization. CONCLUSION M&E companies still managing video content in LTO tape libraries suffer from major inefficiencies, and in turn, lost revenue. The format simply wasn't designed for the modern media landscape. Object storage is a much newer architecture that was built to accommodate massive data volumes in the digital age. Object storage's searchability, accessibility, scalability and centralized management can help broadcasters boost ROI from existing content.