In Broadcast - February 2015 - 60

60

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 5 - Issue 2 | February 2015

InForm

What's In Store
For Year Ahead?
Laurent Fanichet, Product Marketing, Scale-Out Storage, EMEA at Quantum
looks ahead to the storage issues for media and entertainment in 2015...
4K goes mainstream: The holiday
season no doubt saw a dramatic
increase in the number of 4K
televisions purchased by consumers,
which in turn will lead to a growing
demand for 4K content.
Our belief is that the initial
distribution of 4K content will happen
via IP delivery (i.e. smart, connected
TVs and devices) with services such as
Netflix, Amazon, etc. leading the way.
Traditional broadcast distribution of
4K content will be slow to come due to
the massive investment needed both
at the broadcast plant and throughout
the terrestrial, cable and satellite
distribution networks.
But the move to 4K will be
predominant upstream at the point
of production, where 4K (or greater)
cameras are now standard and 4K
production tools (everything from
live switchers, slow motion graphics,
editing, etc.) become 4K capable.
All of this 4K production will strain
existing legacy storage infrastructures,
especially legacy general purpose
storage systems that were never
designed to handle these data rates in
real-time.
Content owners and producers
will want to move as much of their
production to 4K as possible, enabling
both the emerging distribution
services but more importantly
to have that higher resolution
content available for future use
and monetisation. This will drive
interest in more specialised storage
infrastructure that is optimised for 4K
workflows.

Quantum StorNext Pro ready for 4K
media workflows

Cloud becomes a part of the
workflow: Today, most people see
"the cloud" as a simple repository for
content, as in a Dropbox sort of model.
But the constant push/pull of content
up to the cloud and back every time
that content is needed for a project
doesn't make sense and takes too
much time. While cloud economics
look attractive because of the sharing
of IT resources, the ROI has been
less positive for media workflow
applications.
This is about to change as more
efficient integration of cloud services
into media workflows becomes
possible and workflow applications
become more cloud-enabled. Whether
media companies use private cloud
deployments or rely on public cloud
infrastructure, there will be a strong
push to move workflow to the cloud,
enabling wide-scale collaboration,
instant access to content from
anywhere and limitless content
distribution.
The combination of cloud storage
and cloud processing for media
content will enable entirely new
workflows
that
make
content
producers more efficient, more
productive and ultimately more
profitable.
Workflow
Automation
takes
centre stage: The media industry
has a plethora of technologies that
attempt to help manage the lifecycle
of working with media, including
Content Management Systems, Digital
Asset Management, Media Asset
Management, etc.
Historically, automation typically
focused mostly on device automation
within a media facility. The next wave
will bring together aspects of media
management and automation to
automate many of the processes of a
media workflow. This new Workflow
Automation will not simply track
media assets as they move through
their lifecycle, but rather move
media through the various stages
automatically based on business rules

and process management.
New Workflow Automation platforms
will understand media lifecycles and
actively move content through the
workflow, triggering both creative
tasks and system processing tasks as
needed. These tools will seamlessly
manage content that is local, remote
or in the cloud and will interface with
storage infrastructure in entirely new,
more intelligent ways.
Converged infrastructure for
media workflows: The old adage, "the
best tool for the job", still rings true.
To get a job done right, you need the
right tool. However, in the world of IT
infrastructure, having too many tools
creates management headaches and
complicated environments.
Most content producers are not
in the business of managing IT
infrastructure and are looking for
more intelligent platforms that
minimise
complexity.
Achieving
this requires collapsing the various
silos that often develop into a
more
coordinated,
converged
infrastructure with data management
layers that span across the different
components to present a more unified
environment. In media workflows,
many tools require specific underlying
storage or processing capabilities, but
not all of these capabilities are needed
all the time.
What we will see emerge is a level
of intelligent data management that
automatically moves content from one
type of storage (i.e. high performance
storage) to another (i.e. cloud-based
archive storage) depending on the
workflow.
Users will no longer have to
remember where an asset is located
physically,
as
the
underlying
infrastructure presents a logical
converged interface for access to all
stored content, regardless of actual
location.
Storage is still the bottleneck: To a
large extent, most media facilities have
solved the compute and networking

Quantum's Laurent Fanichet

challenges associated with building
collaborative workflows.
However, they still struggle with
storage infrastructure that is unwieldy,
hard to manage, unpredictable and
difficult to scale cost-effectively.
Storage is the one aspect of IT
infrastructure that still causes
the most headaches and is where
breakdowns in an efficient workflow
most often happen.
Unfortunately for many, this trend
will continue. Too many organisations
take a general purpose storage
platform and try to "make it work"
for a media workflow. While in some
cases this might be good enough to
get started, at some point it becomes
clear that storage is the bottleneck to
growing operations, working with new
formats (like 4K), using new workflow
applications or meeting ever-tighter
production deadlines.
What is needed is a more specialised
storage infrastructure that delivers
the optimal mix of performance,
scale, capacity and flexibility, all while
remaining cost-conscious - the holy
grail of storage!
Successful
media
production
environments
require
high
performance storage for real-time
media operations (such as ingesting
or editing), extended online storage
for non-real-time operations (such as
transcoding or packaging) and cloud
or tape archive storage for long-term
preservation of both raw and finished
content.
This entire environment, under the
control of an intelligent multi-tier data
management platform, ensures that
content is always at the right place
at the right time, thereby minimising
storage bottlenecks and enabling more
efficient media workflows.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.quantum.com/ http://www.stornext.com/solutions/stornextpro/4k/
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