NetApp Solutions for Media and Entertainment

Moving to a NetApp consolidated data fabric approach simplifies IT infrastructure and administration, reduces redundant data, and speeds access to assets for all departments.

Regardless of the challenge, NetApp provides highly configurable and tunable storage and data management to fit the requirements.

NetApp storage systems work together with external resources like the industry's best cloud and media application providers to optimize and automate data management throughout your business to increase efficiency, protect valuable assets, and free up human resources to be more effective.

2D and 3D animation and visual effects production (VFX) generate a massive amount of data in the form of hundreds of thousands of individual files, which must be passed to processor farms for rendering into digital images. With the goal of rendering images as quickly as possible, storage systems must be able to keep the render farm working 100% of the time, which requires tremendous IOPS performance. NetApp ONTAP is extremely fast software for highly parallel compute applications such as feature animation and VFX rendering, where thousands of compute nodes might need to access the same computer graphics and texture elements. ONTAP is tuned for high I/O performance and cache flexibility, with several flash options available, from NetApp Flash Cache directly in the controller to NetApp Flash Pool and all-flash arrays. These options allow NetApp to balance performance, capacity, and cost to meet your budget. Animation studios with many thousands of render cores trust NetApp to provide industry-leading performance for their 24/7 render farms.

With video resolutions, frame rates, and color depths multiplying with each next-generation format, the demands on storage to ingest, store, retrieve, and deliver content are constantly increasing. What used to be one editor working at a single workstation with dedicated storage might now be a globally distributed team of people sharing a single pool of content that spans the globe. NetApp E-Series storage arrays set the standard for bandwidth and configurability, meeting the needs of a broad range of facilities and workgroups. Because of its modular scalability of both capacity and bandwidth, E-Series can be configured cost effectively to support editing and postproduction operations ranging from small corporate and college video departments working in HD to multinational television and film studios generating 4K and beyond.

The demands of modern broadcast operations go beyond the challenges of live multicamera ingest and quick-turn production cycles, to include content preparation for hundreds of distribution partners and tightly coupled content and financial transaction operations. Complex workflows can be difficult to manage and maintain. This is particularly true in organizations that have disparate storage systems deployed throughout a facility—or the world. Comprehensive data infrastructure management with central monitoring and control is a requirement that few application providers consider and fewer storage providers offer. NetApp provides seamless data management to broadcasters for both their business and production operations based on NetApp E-Series and ONTAP systems, along with NetApp OnCommand Unified Manager. Without an efficient and effective way to manage data and storage systems throughout the organization, the cost benefits of improved workflow performance can be quickly negated by management overhead and reduced productivity.

Over the decades, the process of creating and supplying media has changed from a hand-crafted process to content factories. The challenges of managing, moving, and monetizing media assets are overwhelming. The cost of managing exponentially growing media repositories is outstripping the cost of data storage. Multiple sites with separate media asset management, production, and distribution applications cause a proliferation of file copies, with little or no coordination among workflows. Media companies are being forced to reevaluate how to effectively manage and migrate large amounts of content spread over many locations. They need to confirm that content is stored on the right tier at the right time, to reduce duplication of content files, and to identify and delete copies that are no longer needed. NetApp StorageGRID is an object storage system that can house, replicate, and protect content in a facility or across continents. StorageGRID includes a policy engine that programmatically copies, moves, and distributes content across multiple nodes regardless of their location. When used in conjunction with E-Series or ONTAP, media files can be moved to StorageGRID and stored as objects that include both the file data and metadata about the file. This allows data portability among systems and futureproofing as new operating systems and file systems are developed. Also, StorageGRID is infinitely scalable and self-healing. From a single hard drive failing to a disaster at a facility, there's no impact on the availability of data to the rest of the StorageGRID storage.

Massive repositories of video, audio, and image media are proliferating throughout the internet. Many media companies are deploying systems to monetize their own intellectual property, while others are creating services that allow users to submit content. Regardless of the business model, these operators face significant challenges. First, there's the constant need for more capacity. In the ever-growing world of media on the internet, it's not enough to overprovision and then wait to scale later. Constant growth must be built into the design of the storage environment. Second, there's the issue of commercial transactions. Opening a business on the internet means giving billions of people the opportunity to interact with it. When every interaction means potential revenue, the speed and capacity of the system to keep up with demand becomes crucial. NetApp ONTAP and StorageGRID address both concerns. ONTAP not only provides incredibly fast software on which to store and serve media, it's also the superior choice for database, analytics, and machine-learning applications. StorageGRID offers a way to maintain content anywhere and everywhere, with limitless scalability and self-healing data protection. As content ages, policies can move it to tape or to the cloud automatically. This procedure eliminates cloud vendor lock-in and the need to manually move or delete millions of files, greatly improving the economics of your media repository.

At the end of the day, media businesses are still businesses. They have all the same functional and operational requirements as any other organization. But when it comes to IT infrastructure, they may have an advantage. Unlike other companies, where the "factory floor" is populated by specialized equipment like assembly lines, medical equipment, or transportation systems, media companies can reduce IT infrastructure and overhead costs by leveraging the same storage provider for both business operations and the media operations. NetApp ONTAP has a complete suite of enterprise features, including data management, protection, security, resiliency, scalability, and cloud integration. The largest companies in the world use ONTAP to support their databases, DevOps environments, AI and machine-learning initiatives, and much more. Using NetApp on both sides of the house means streamlined IT management and operations, tighter integration between media production and its monetization, and a more strategic approach to storage and data management. NetApp OnCommand Unified Manager delivers a unified experience to manage physical and virtual storage environments by using integrated workflows and policy-driven automation. From a single dashboard, Unified Manager simplifies shared IT storage management, delivering efficiency at scale across the largest media operations, on the premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration.