As the media and entertainment industry moves to 4K resolution and virtual/augmented content formats, the storage and archive requirements for media content has grown exponentially. But while storage requirements continue to skyrocket, industry revenue has not grown accordingly – and M&E organizations are finding themselves challenged to “do more with less.” More organizations are looking to leverage the cost efficiencies, scalability and flexibility that cloud storage can offer, but many remain apprehensive about taking the plunge.
To be clear, in this post when we talk about “the cloud,” we’re talking cloud architectures, versus the public cloud provided by vendors such as Microsoft, AWS and Google, among others. Unlike public clouds, cloud architectures can be used completely within your facility if desired and they are designed with infinite scalability and ease of access in mind.
There are a number of misperceptions about moving data to cloud architectures that are (wait for it) clouding people’s judgment. It’s time we busted some of the bigger myths and misperceptions out there about cloud storage.
Myth #1: I’ll have to learn a whole new interface – false! Dell’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) employs a tiered system, where it sits under a file system – in our case, Isilon. For organizations already deploying Isilon SAN or NAS storage platforms, the workflows stay exactly as they were, as does users’ interface to the file system.
This tiered approach helps companies to “do more with less” by allowing them to free up primary storage and consolidate resources. By tiering down “cold,” inactive data to ECS, you can better optimize your tier-one higher performance storage and drive down costs.
Myth #2: My data won’t be safe in the cloud – false! ECS features a geo-efficient architecture that stores, distributes and protects data both locally and geographically, eliminating any single point of failure and providing a seamless failover from site to site with no impact to business. Further, even though the data within ECS is distributed, it’s still a secure, private environment so users won’t run into scenarios where anyone can access information without the right credentials.
Myth #3: Collaboration and access is going to be negatively impacted – false! If you look at the VFX industry, for example, teams are frequently spread across the world and working across time zones on a 24/7 basis. ECS enables global teams to work on the same piece of data at the same time from one system – it’s true collaboration. ECS’s multi-site, active-active architecture and universal accessibility enables anywhere access to content from any application or device.
Myth #4: Moving to the cloud is an all-or-nothing approach – false! ECS can be deployed when your organization is ready for it – whether that’s in a month, or six months, or a year. We realize a lot of operations personnel like to “see” their data and know first-hand that it’s there. We get that. But as things evolve, it’s likely that organizations will face pressure to take at least some of the data offsite. With ECS, you can still keep your data in the data center and, when the time is right to take your data off-site, Dell can work with your organization to move your infrastructure to a hosted facility or a co-lo where you can continue to access your data just as you did when it was on-premise. ECS is available in a variety of form factors that can be deployed and expanded incrementally, so you can choose the right size for your immediate needs and project growth.
Because it is designed with “limitless scale” in mind, ECS eliminates concerns and worries of running out of storage, it can meet the needs for today’s M&E organizations, as well as those in the future simply by adding additional storage, just as you used to do with tapes.
Hopefully we’ve been able to bust a few of the myths around adopting a cloud-based storage architecture. This video featuring Dell’s Tom Burns and Manuvir Das can offer additional insight into ECS’s tiered approach and how media organizations can begin seeing benefits from day one.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyZIGHV3DFE”]
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