Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524965
THE VALUE OF CHOICE Have you ever stopped to wonder just how many features and functions of your most necessary software applications that you actually use in your day to day? If not, I bet your IT team has given more than a passing thought to the ques- tion as they assess every tool and application coming into your business. What comes to mind is the word processing tool with which I'm currently typing. As I glance through the many menus and capabilities pre- sented to me, I'm struck by the fact that I use a very small percentage of the total feature set. The next question I ask myself, and mind you it's an uncomfortable one, is whether or not I'm paying for all these unused capabilities? Whether we're talking about software applica- tions, vehicles, fine dining or insurance, the trend that customers are embracing is asking to pay only for what they really need. Anything more — anything unused — is waste, pure and simple. In order to give customers just what they need and no more, technology providers must embrace flexibility and modularity. For software providers, this means embracing trends like composable software, which is a technical descriptor for an architecture built on modularity, modular independence and the ability to combine or recombine modules to create different tiers or bundles of software functionality. What it really boils down to is the fact that companies and individuals like the freedom of choice to select exactly what they need to get a job done. No more and no less. Composable software helps to make this a reality. What does this all have to do with data storage technology in the M&E industry? It accentuates the need for storage vendors to move away from their older, more traditional offers, which are in many ways monolithic stor- age products chock full of features and capabilities that most customers hardly ever use because every single customer gets every bit of functionality, whether they want it or not. We need to embrace composability and mod- ularity, which enable storage vendors to create different combinations of feature sets to address the specific needs of different customers and users in different segments of the M&E industry. No two customers are alike, and nobody's workflow is cookie-cutter. We need to stop treating them that way and making them pay for capabilities they really don't need! On the journey to embrace composability and modularity, we've noticed one or two peculiarities about the data storage industry that probably need to change, too. In an era of hardware commoditization, why do we still base much of our thinking and pricing on the amount of storage capacity a cus- tomer deploys? The software features that manage capacity and data are the same regardless of how much capacity exists within the solution. Isn't the overarching software that drives the storage solution the high-value part of the equation? Again, we can price different feature sets differently, but we shouldn't penalize customers with adjustable software pricing simply for growing their data storage capacity. A constant in any business is that price needs to be a pure reflection of the value customers can expect. With mod- ern storage solutions, the value resides within the software. Customers want choices, and they want options tailor-fit to meet their specific needs. If we're not trying to understand our customers' organiza- tions and workflows, but rather trying to position a single, monolithic storage solutions into their environments, then we're embracing the view of an early automobile innovator who might have declared that customers could have any color car they wanted — as long as it was black. OPTIMIZING CREATIVE COLLABORATION WITH HYBRID STORAGE Post houses and other creative businesses have been exploring hybrid storage models as a way to benefit from the flexibility of the cloud without giving up the high performance they're accustomed to with on-prem storage systems. By implementing hybrid on-prem/cloud storage systems, post houses and production companies can continue to leverage existing storage infra- structure while incrementally expanding into the cloud. And, thanks to the accelerated maturation of cloud technologies, these businesses can realize the exceptional performance and user experience they require for content creation and editing tasks, as well as the security essential to their critical operations. This enables a seamless and efficient transition. Today's cloud storage systems require you to transfer files in and out instead of advanced hybrid cloud storage solutions, which allow users to mount and use their cloud storage as if on-premise. So, whether working with creative apps, an asset management system or any other familiar tool, creatives enjoy a NAS experience and the freedom to move to a different site, open up a project and get right to work. Global access, performance, flexibility and security coexist without sacrifice. Cloud storage is reliable, secure and fast enough for permanent storage. The most modern solutions also deliver robust auditing functionality with tight control over media and end users. For these reasons, some hybrid cloud organizations are moving to a pure cloud-enabled, NAS-experience- everywhere model. Others are shifting most of their data to the cloud and selectively dropping physical boxes to instantly scale performance. Supplying access to blocks of hot data, on-prem accelerators give multiple users a shared cache with the functionality they expect of conventional on- prem storage, but at a fraction of the cost. These advanced hybrid solutions better support distributed teams, which have become common in content production. The unparalleled flexibility, speed and scalability of cloud-enabled storage, complemented by local- ly-deployed storage or accelerator boxes, gives production teams conve- nient access to data and performance to work efficiently from any location. Supporting seamless collaboration without boundaries, this hybrid model offers the best of both worlds — an ideal mix of on-prem and cloud storage. STORAGE www.postmagazine.com 21 POST JULY/AUG 2024 BY TREVOR MORGAN PH.D, SVP OPERATIONS OPENDRIVES HTTPS://OPENDRIVES. COM BY DOMINIC HARLAND CEO GB LABS WWW.GBLABS.COM