Up against underperforming storage arrays, strategic marketing specialist Digital Image saw an all -purpose solution in Nyriad UltralO.
The strategic marketing services firm focused on offering high-quality creative agency services for its customers worldwide, wanted to improve its performance per dollar, store more onsite data resiliently and efficiently manage its media elements.
Having met those criteria, any new solution also had to reliably serve large amounts of real-time 8K digital video and volumes of 3D CAD data generated by their production teams.
The Digital Image team made the decision to replace its three existing storage arrays with a single Nyriad UltraIO storage system, developed by Austin, Texas, based Nyriad.
Now, the team has realized a 2.5x performance improvement, with all of its data seamlessly and securely integrated within their facility.
Increased resiliency and improved storage efficiency has enabled the team to streamline workflows, saving up to 2.5 days per project.
Digital Image has extensive in-house computer-generated animation, video, audio, graphics and digital marketing resources allowing them to progress smoothly from initial concept to finished product, pitching a seamless marketing process for their customers.
A driving factor for Digital Image considering alternative solutions was a lack of satisfaction with the performance based on the cost of its existing storage hardware.
David Hellie, Digital Image CEO, said: “As a company that creates highly innovative marketing services, our time to deliver is either our biggest asset or most demanding challenge. To accelerate our throughput, we must always look for better strategies.”
As the source video sizes increase exponentially with 8K shoots, Digital Image found their existing storage environment was hindering the ability to reliably deliver high quality projects on time.
Challenges with access and moving very large files across slow networks led to complex and risky file copy strategies that not only taxed the IT team, but also caused multi-hour delays for editors and creators.
These complex processes also put data-in-flight at risk, while simultaneously straining backup and recovery environments. Over time, they found their storage infrastructure was creating more risk than benefit and needed to be refreshed.
Digital Image completed exhaustive real-time production testing of UltraIO, which is based on a new storage architecture that leverages the speed and power of both GPUs and CPUs running advanced algorithms.
Throughout the evaluation, Digital Image was not only able to perform single projects in-line for the first time on raw video footage (without the need to transcode, create proxies, and copy files across the network to local editing stations), it was also able to perform in-line editing operations on multiple projects simultaneously from all their editing suites and rendering farms.
This proved truly transformative for Digital Image’s business, and overall operational efficiency, providing them with a significant competitive advantage.
Digital Image made the decision to replace its three disparate storage arrays with a single, easy to manage UltraIO system. With approximately 1PB of usable storage capacity within a dense, space-saving footprint, Digital Image now has the performance it needs to run its entire operation seamlessly.
It also has the capacity to store its daily projects, and to ingest almost 300TB of finished product into an active archive, providing a significant cycle time improvement versus restoring older files for production use, that up until now, have been in an offline archive.
“We are now running significantly faster, and all our data is seamlessly integrated securely within our facility. The resulting workflow improvements are far more dependable than we could have ever expected. Our entire team has been highly satisfied with the solid performance of the UltraIO storage devices and newfound trust in great customer support relationships,” said Hellie.
Digital Image has seen a considerable increase to their performance, including 2.5-times gain in write throughput, significantly improving their performance per dollar.
Not only has performance improved but it is now also consistent, and this predictability is critical to their business, whether one editor is working or 20.
Leveraging Nyriad’s UltraIO system, Digital Image is now able to perform video scrubbing in real time and edit 6k and higher digital assets inline without the need for copying locally or transcoding to lower resolution proxy files. This saves setup time per project as well as eliminating the need to make an additional set of files for that project, increasing employee productivity and efficiency.
By removing that bottleneck, Digital Image is able to see productivity gains not by hiring additional editors, but rather increasing the per editor productivity rate and enabling them to work on more projects than previously feasible.
Another benefit realized is that multiple editors can now work inline simultaneously.
Resiliency is another key reason Digital Image has decided to move to the UltraIO system. Where previously it was vulnerable to drive failures with performance degradation, and even lost data in one instance during a drive failure, it now can withstand up to 10% of drives failing with no data loss and with minimal degradation in performance. This provides Digital Image with the confidence that it can deliver and meet tight customer deadlines with a high-quality product, without the concern of storage infrastructure being a bottleneck.
Digital Image was also able to solve its challenges backing up its 3D render farm as well as 3D and audio editing workstations.
Previously, the render farm backups were slow, resulting in data protection gaps. By utilizing the UltraIO system as a target for backup infrastructure, backup and restore throughput became three times more efficient and failures were eliminated.
With the UltraIO system, Digital Image has the storage capacity to back up its editing workstations and has an RTO of less than one hour to restore.
Previously, this manual restore process was laborious, taking approximately 1.5 days and preventing IT staff from achieving other objectives while rebuilding a workstation.
With the efficiency of the UltraIO system, Digital Image has the capacity available to keep its files in one place, no longer needing to shuffle files across local drives or prematurely archive files, allowing it to easily access assets in real time and use them across multiple projects.
Combining the performance, resiliency, and efficiency gains the UltraIO system provides to Digital Image, the new storage system saves days of work per project, transforming the business and strengthening competitive edge.
