The media sector is undergoing a huge process of digitisation. And, it’s an industry with challenges like no other.
That’s because its requirements of scale and availability to data – measured in speed and multiple concurrent access – are just not found in other verticals.
Here we look at the key challenges for data and storage in the media sector, and the opportunities presented by AI, the cloud and containerisation.
What we find is an industry ripe for huge leaps in efficiency but where IT projects have often not fulfilled their potential.
By weighing up key challenges in data and storage in media, the article gives advice about the solutions that can bring optimal results and carry the business forward.
Media sector digitisation and the data challenges it brings
Almost no industry sector exists solely in digital format, but large chunks of media and broadcast do. All activity has as its end result a movie or image file, and some products spend their entire lives as digital creations.
During those lifecycles projects can experience huge data growth. As workflows proceed from concept to finished product, data volumes can balloon from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes while processing requirements also swell.
That’s the first key challenge in media and broadcast – data growth that is constant and almost exponential.
At the same time, as workflows progress, the number of people that must work on it increases rapidly until eventually hundreds or thousands of workstations scattered across the globe contribute towards the finished product.
Here then, the challenge is to access files rapidly, often concurrently, and from multiple locations and timezones.
Meanwhile, data can be in disparate formats – file and object primarily. Beyond access to data there is the overhead created as connections are controlled by back-end systems like directory services.
Often too, media sector customers wrestle with legacy products, such as tape, which has its place, but as archive only in contemporary media workflows.
Many also still run monolithic media asset management platforms, which can bring their own challenges of proprietary formats and commercial and technical lock-in.
In content distribution, the challenges are similar. Scale and scalability of storage is key, as vast volumes of data must be held, and be available to guarantee the viewing experience.
Opportunities to improve data storage in media, but often not realised
What we’ve discussed so far are the key challenges for the media and broadcast. There are opportunities too. But these present difficulties in deployment that have often led to sub-optimal results.
As we’ve seen, media and broadcast is subject to huge data growth and massive ongoing data storage requirements. For that reason the cloud can be an ideal storage (and processing) location.
But the cloud also comes with pitfalls if not managed successfully. These can include unforeseen financial penalties, for example, from data egress. But also from disjunctures between on-site storage and workflows and their counterparts in the cloud.
So, the cloud can be costly, create management overheads and bring technical issues such as latency.
Then there is AI, which can be leveraged, for example, in VFX, animation and other rendering use cases. But like AI anywhere, its efficiency is heavily dependent on rapid access to data to allow GPUs to be fed at a cost effective rate. Get this wrong and it can be an expensive outlay for sub-optimal outcomes.
Finally, there is containerisation and Devops, which is key to successfully leveraging hybrid cloud working. In other words, hybrid cloud can achieve optimal results when on-prem and cloud workloads can seamlessly work between environments.
Containers bring their own challenges, however, especially in storage and backup as they weren’t originally designed to require persistent storage.
Key requirements for storage in the media vertical
To sum up, the key storage challenges in the media vertical as it undergoes digitisation are:
- Data growth, that accelerates during projects
- Distributed data and disparate formats
- Mission critical storage access and availability requirements
- Efficient use of hybrid cloud architectures, AI, containerisation and Devops.
All of which means customers should seek storage solutions that can address these challenges and make optimal use of the opportunities presented by new technologies.
Core among these is to build a rationalised storage infrastructure with:
- A single platform for file and object
- That works across on-prem and cloud locations
- Delivers container storage and data protection
- AI and rich metadata capabilities.
What media customers should look for from data storage suppliers
Customers should work with a supplier that can provide all the storage they need. That means unified storage with access to file, object and block storage.
The ability to scale on-prem storage is a vital requirement, and it must allow for non-disruptive storage upgrades independent of compute.
If that infrastructure supplier can tier to third party storage that’s a benefit that can make better use of lower cost storage assets. It should all be managed from a single pane of glass for operational efficiency.
Meanwhile, the ability to operate via a hybrid cloud model is a core attribute.
As we’ve seen, the ability to burst workloads to the cloud at times of high demand is key to the needs of media workflows. In addition, the ability to work seamlessly between on-prem and cloud can bring benefits for remote work and collaboration as well as for content distribution to end customers. If a customer can use the vendor’s storage instances in the hyperscaler clouds – costs can come down significantly.
To optimise hybrid cloud working implies use of containers and Devops deployment methods. But, scaling containers across cloud, datacentre and edge environments can quickly become complex and costly. So, look for a storage supplier that can manage containers and containerised applications across your environment, with the ability to seamlessly migrate between on-prem and cloud.
Finally, also look for a storage provider that has full integrations with AI resources so you can take full advantage of the efficiencies they can bring.
About the Author
Stuart Heade is EMEA Sales Director at Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS). Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software, offering organizations a single platform for running apps and data across clouds. With Nutanix, companies can reduce complexity and simplify operations, freeing them to focus on their business outcomes. Building on its legacy as the pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure, Nutanix is trusted by companies worldwide to power hybrid multicloud environments consistently, simply, and cost-effectively.
