End-to-End Media Workflows with Hammerspace & Cloudian
Automate Production Workflows with Multiple Storage Tiers for Hybrid Cloud & Multi-site
Solutions Brief
Focus on Production Pipelines, Not on Wrangling Storage Silos
Media and entertainment production houses are continually struggling in a three-legged race that forces them to juggle the problems of explosive data growth with the need to rapidly accommodate new projects, and to do both without costs spiraling out of control. An increase in any of these three variables has a direct impact on the others, and negatively impacts M&E businesses.
The problem is that there is no one-size-fits-all storage solution that can cost-effectively support both high-performance workloads and low-cost scale-out use cases while also handling hybrid-cloud, multi-site and remote collaboration. For customers who want the freedom to pick best of breed storage for each of these use cases it typically means they are forced to wrangle manual processes and point solutions that copy data from one storage type or location to another. Not only does this add storage and operational costs, but it also interrupts user workflows, which pulls the hand-brake on production capacity.
Key Customer Benefits
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- Accelerate Production Pipelines with Greater Flexibility Across Storage Silos
- Bridge On-Prem, Multi-site & Cloud Seamlessly
- Cut Costs and Complexity with Global Access and Control
- Eliminate Vendor Lock-In & Automate Global Data Services
- Rapidly Provision Remote Artists with Online Access
Global Access to All Files on Any Storage Without Copy Sprawl
Hammerspace solves these problems by automating data orchestration and unified global file access across storage from any vendor at the edge, in data centers, and the cloud. Combined with Cloudian HyperStore, the solution provides customers with unprecedented power and flexibility in rapidly adapting production pipelines for any workflow, including hybrid use cases across any storage type anywhere.
In this way, high-performance online storage from any vendor can be combined in an automated always-on global data environment that can seamlessly include Cloudian’s low-cost scale-out HyperStore for hybrid-cloud storage. This directly addresses post-production, broadcast, distribution and active archive workloads globally across one or more sites and cloud providers.
Hammerspace spans on-prem and cloud storage silos with a high-performance Parallel Global File System, providing users with global file access and automated data orchestration across silos and locations. Multi-site and cloud deployments can rapidly expand or contract production capacity to manage shifting workloads.
Cross-Platform Data Orchestration, Without User Interruption
Hammerspace’s innovation is to provide a high-performance Parallel Global File System that bridges existing and new storage from any vendor, and across multiple locations and clouds. All users see the same file system metadata in a global namespace across all sites. Not file copies, but the same files via this global metadata control plane.
Data placement and other data services between tiers, sites, and clouds can now be orchestrated globally and completely transparent to users in the background, even on live files that are in use. This can be automated with custom metadata to drive policy-based workflows, or be triggered by job schedulers such as Autodesk Shotgrid.
Because the Hammerspace Global Data Environment spans both on-premises and Cloud storage resources in a single global file system, this also means that EDA workflows can burst into Cloud compute and storage resources on demand, enabling both the flexibility and the efficiency of rapidly provisioning additional resources to parallelize and accelerate design workflows.
In real-world environments, Hammerspace configurations can be finely tuned to the specific EDA workload types, to conserve resources, but also to achieve the needed performance for the specific design requirements.
The problem is that there is no one-size-fits-all storage solution to handle use cases that include high-performance workloads, low-cost scale-out, plus hybrid-cloud, and multi-site in a single neat package.
Cloudian HyperStore Adds Scalability
Cloudian HyperStore brings another layer of flexibility to this scenario, providing a hybrid storage solution that scales into petabytes for on-prem, cloud, and multi-site, with costs as low as ½ cent per GB per month. This provides scale-out storage for multiple use cases with 100x the performance of tape, with costs comparable to public cloud.
Combined with Hammerspace, users and applications have universal file access across all sites and locations with an architecture that scales without limits. Cloudian nodes can scale out to massive scales when needed to provide a seamless extension to existing high-performance production storage from any vendor. Together, they can extend active production namespaces to provide global unified file access across them all without impacting existing high performance tiers.
In addition, Hammerspace and Cloudian can dynamically extend this always-on global file access across multiple sites, clouds, and cloud regions for maximum flexibility, to grow or contract as needed to accommodate changing production requirements.
Automating Data Services Across Hybrid-Cloud Workflows
The global reach of Hammerspace’s Parallel Global File System means data services can be centrally automated across all silos and locations, including the cloud, without the need for vendor-specific point solutions. These include data protection features such as file versioning, global snapshots, dedupe, encryption, WORM, and undelete. But also the ability to leverage automated custom metadata to track project assets and trigger workflows or burst-to-cloud use cases for rendering, storage, and more.
From the perspective of users and their applications, files are simply in the folder hierarchies they are used to, regardless of which storage type or location they may move to in the background. But administrators now have global control of all files and can transparently automate data orchestration and services across all silos, clouds, and sites without impacting user access, or causing downtime.
Enable Remote Artists Online Access to Production Workflows
An added benefit of providing high-performance global file access across silos, sites, and clouds is production pipelines can also rapidly bring remote artists online to collaborate on projects without the headaches of migrating whole datasets to remote locations.
Unlike solutions that shuffle file copies across incompatible storage types and distributed environments, Hammerspace’s high-performance Parallel Global File System seamlessly spans on-prem and cloud resources so users everywhere are working on the same datasets.
And because Hammerspace supports on-prem or cloud storage from any vendor, it enables customers maximum flexibility to use any existing or new storage, without needing to consolidate data into proprietary cloud or on-prem resources to provision remote users.
Learn More
Contact your Hammerspace and Cloudian sales teams for more information, and to learn how their solution can benefit your workflows.
