Future-proofing Media Workflows through Software-defined Storage

A Frost & Sullivan White Paper

Future-proofing Media Workflows through Software-defined Storage:Making the Case for Intelligent and Agile Storage Platforms

Mukul Krishna, Practice Head, Digital MediaRobert Cavin, Industry Analyst, Digital MediaElvia Valdes, Research Associate, Digital Media

Contents

Cause and Effect – The Storage Conundrum by the Numbers ............................................................................ 3

Growing Pains – The Challenge of Using Yesterday’s Storage Architecture for Tomorrow’s Digital Media Landscape ................................................................................................................................................ 4

The Need of the Hour – An Intelligent and Agile Storage Platform ................................................................... 5

Leveraging Software for Agility and Simplicity .................................................................................................................. 5

Flexibility ............................................................................................................................................................. 6

Adaptability ........................................................................................................................................................................ 6

Simplicity ............................................................................................................................................................................. 6

Usability............................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Reliability ............................................................................................................................................................................. 6

Security ................................................................................................................................................................................ 6

Affordability ........................................................................................................................................................ 7

The Last Word ................................................................................................................................................................. 7

Call to Action ................................................................................................................................................................... 8

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Future-proofing Media Workflows through Software-defined Storage: Making the Case for Intelligent and Agile Storage Platforms

Ubiquitous networks and rampant device proliferation have ushered in an era of unprecedented video consumption. This explosion in demand for video and increasing resolution (HD to UHD) is putting a severe strain on video workflows. Media companies today are trying to navigate through a complex array of technologies and trying to invest in the right solutions to keep up with this demand while remaining profitable. Fundamentally critical to these video workflows is the underlying storage that enables the video creation-to-consumption value chain. Storage allows disparate teams to collaborate through the creative process and is the content repository to distribute content across myriad devices. However, too often we find media companies simply investing tactically in storage without thinking of long-term ramifications, leading to even more complex, less-secure, and disparate workflows.

The market today does not just need more storage, but needs more intelligent storage to alleviate the relentless pressure to deliver higher-quality content in shorter periods of time, with fewer resources and smaller budgets. This paper will explore some of the key challenges media companies face today and explore how intelligent and agile media storage initiatives can overcome these challenges, while enabling video workflows to future-proof themselves from the unrelenting demands of a consumer market with an insatiable appetite for more content.

Cause and effeCt – the storage Conundrum by the numbers

Though a global phenomenon, the US and Canada alone released 708 films in 2015, a 19% increase since 2006, and 409 original English-language scripted shows in prime-time alone, a 94% increase since 2009. This does not even include the countless hours of content produced for game shows, news, reality shows, sports, and talk shows, not to mention corporations turning to video for product introductions and training. All of these media assets have to be stored somewhere that is easily accessible by production teams.

Frost & Sullivan analyzes the media & entertainment storage market regularly, covering all geographies (NALA, EMEA, APAC), markets (post-production, broadcast, pay TV and OTT) and storage systems (SAN, NAS, DAS, cloud). Our latest analysis shows that in 2012, the market stood at $2 billion and tripled to a whopping $6 billion in 2015. The post-production component alone accounted for between 15 and 20% of the total market—a more than 100% increase from 2012 in dollar terms. The cause for this increase is obvious—the demand for video. This demand can be seen in Frost & Sullivan’s research in the video-enabled consumer device market (including video game consoles, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, smart TVs, smart phones, tablets and IP streaming devices), which shows that the market grew from 1.24 billion units in 2012 to close to doubling in size and accounting for 2.25 billion units in 2015 at a CAGR of 22% globally. To add further context to this phenomenon, let us look at the total VOD market that includes cable, IPTV, DTH/satellite and the Internet; the total number of global subscribers for VOD services grew from 250.1 million in 2012 to 445.4 million in 2015, and the total number of titles streamed grew from 710 million to 1.11 billion in 2015. This gives further perspective to why Frost & Sullivan’s research found the storage market for digital media grew three times from 2012 to 2015.

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growing Pains – the Challenge of using yesterday’s storage arChiteCture for tomorrow’s digital media landsCaPe

But where is all this storage going? If, for example, we look at a typical post-production ecosystem as shown below, we will find that there is only one component that is critically needed at every juncture from creation to consumption—storage.

Rendering

Camera

VFXIntegrationAcquistion Editing

SoundEffects

ColorCorrectionand Digital

Grading FinalComposite

NonlinearEditing

Storage

Now if we were to extend the ecosystem all the way downstream to the delivery workflow or were to look at the broadcast workflow or for that matter an OTT workflow, we will find storage to be the most critically pervasive component, regardless of the workflow. As seen from the simplified post-production workflow above, video workflows are disparate, and typically storage purchasing decisions and deployments are tactical and scattered. Though massive amounts of storage are being deployed, these storage systems lack interoperability and are not conducive to flexibly scale on the fly as production requirements change.

Further, the ability to add or remove high-availability storage options has become critical to optimize the cost of production and keep pace with changing consumption demands. Production teams are now more dispersed than ever and real-time collaboration among workgroups working on high-resolution video relies on having an agile storage foundation that fosters a secure, adaptable and reliable workflow. Achieving all of this on the fly with no user interruption has been typically an expensive challenge to overcome. Media companies can no longer afford any latency in their production workflows, as it now has a direct impact on how fast they can monetize content in increasingly shrinking release windows.

Content creation is now fluid and not a set of isolated functions. Whether it’s broadcast news or a Hollywood studio creating various versions of a feature spanning languages and HD or UHD, the creation process is complex, disparate and nonlinear. Media workflows, however, are not optimized for this, as they have traditionally been siloed with specific hand-off points between pre-production, production, post-production and distribution.

The media industry has experienced a variety of capability expansions that complicate video production workflows. This has created multiple layers of complexity for users to grapple with as they try to get their arms around their storage requirements in terms of capacity, scalability, interoperability and a long list of performance criteria to manage low-latency collaboration, ever-increasing video resolution going to 4K and beyond, and the need to transcode and manage video and the associated metadata in various encoding formats and profiles for each.




On top of all this, business priorities change, shows get picked up, films get rescheduled, and teams disperse and reform, all requiring reallocation of storage for all their assorted media. The pace of change for this whole process means infrastructure becomes obsolete more quickly, driving returns on investment down just as fast. The growing amount of source material, higher resolutions (HD to UHD), faster turnaround times, and the need to copy/move media and connect geographically dispersed team members encourage the kind of flexibility and adaptability that’s difficult to achieve with traditional drive-based storage. However, the great news is that storage paradigms are also constantly evolving as the market changes. We will now look at how software-defined storage is providing the agility and intelligence to overcome exactly these challenges, and positioning media companies to optimize workflows and become efficient.

the need of the hour – an intelligent and agile storage Platform

Any number of technology, business and consumption trends can place unanticipated demands on a media storage infrastructure within its amortization lifetime. No matter what trends arise, the best way to thrive in the future is to be adaptable to external demands and flexible to internal changes. With traditional storage, drive hardware is set up and configured manually as situations change. Software-defined storage, on the other hand, enables policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware, making storage reallocations easier as situations change.

As mentioned earlier, production teams and priorities change regularly, requiring storage adaptability. With so many editing and production tools involved in creating today’s complex films and television shows, simplicity in any area reduces the burden of managing one more thing. Storage should be a simple “set it and forget it” and “it just works” aspect of your production workflow. Capturing the right shots is difficult enough, much less the non-linear editing process that follows, so storage should conform to the tools and workflow you need instead of forcing your workflow to incorporate your storage system. Plus, you can’t lose production footage, much less afford downtime, because of drive failures and poor storage reliability.

Today’s digital media ecosystem is also susceptible to piracy, while media outlets clamor for anything about popular titles. In such an environment, managing storage access rights across transient creative team members poses a security concern for content producers and technical leaders before it becomes a headache for business leaders. Additional functionality doesn’t usually come at a lower cost, but when software replaces labor-intensive tasks involved in reconfiguring storage, that does lead to improved operating efficiency and lower costs.

The requirement for agility has been transforming the digital media market. Conversations today are moving away from static point solutions that are predominantly hardware appliances toward more holistic software-based paradigms that are reconfigurable and easily adapt to a cloud environment. Why then shouldn’t traditional storage architecture transform as well?

leveraging software for agility and simPliCity

As mentioned earlier, the media & entertainment data storage market is scaling up rapidly with more data than ever before stored on disks of various size capacities. Apart from the three times increase in revenue from 2012 to 2015, Frost & Sullivan’s research also saw the market grow from 5335 petabytes in 2012 to a staggering 27500 petabytes in 2015. However, this is predominantly generic on-premises storage that is not optimized for the rigor required for typical media & entertainment workflows. Most of all, new storage deployments are used as tactical point solutions to meet an immediate need; these are not geared for scalability or interoperability—the biggest demands of the video workflows of tomorrow. We have discussed previously how these traditional storage systems lack the flexibility, adaptability, simplicity, usability, reliability, security and affordability needed to compete in today’s digital media market.



All that physical storage requires resources to manage it and make it accessible to production teams. managing that storage via software running on industry-standard hardware is the fundamental value proposition of software-defined storage. To understand this value proposition better, we need to have a deeper understanding of the benefits software-defined storage brings to the table:

flexibility: A single high-end production environment can require scaling from terabytes to petabytes, giving the smallest teams or largest media enterprises on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable storage resources that can be quickly provisioned and repurposed to accelerate online and nearline production.

Software-defined storage can tailor and tune each workspace’s capacity, performance, and drive protection to the project and client. Added to that, capacity, bandwidth, and redundancy can be upgraded without any hassle or downtime, as internal needs grow. Through the built-in intelligence one can start with a single storage engine, or mix and match multiple engines, to create a configuration that not only meets the needs of today, but also helps future-proof workflows.

adaptability: Evolving project and team priorities derive from unpredictable external demands, such as production popularity and schedule changes. The agility provided through software-defined storage changes dynamically, giving critical projects and high-priority teams maximum performance while scaling back lower-priority workflows. When projects or business needs change, such software-based intelligent media storage adapt on the fly without impacting production. It enables expanding or contracting the workflow to new platform applications and services, offering a real-time scalable set of definable/resizable workspaces to media production workflows.

simplicity: Software-defined storage enables convenient management of the system through a Web interface or APIs, giving management, technical leads, and creative teams extremely high visibility, control and a simple way to manage their workflows. Intuitive software tools enable easy bandwidth reallocation, storage capacity upgrades, and dynamic workspace resizing without any downtime or impact to teams. Ideally, an intelligent media storage solution needs to integrate with existing applications and services via a simple, intuitive interface that enables reconfiguring and reallocating resources while performing monitoring and analysis —a key capability of the software-defined storage value proposition.

usability: Software-based intelligent media storage enables real-time collaboration, giving teams the ability to accelerate production by connecting with hundreds of other content contributors simultaneously. An ideal software-defined storage solution would work with all top media creation applications, such as Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Grass Valley EDIUS, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Autodesk Smoke, and FilmLight Baselight, among others.

reliability: Software-defined storage should allow a choice of media protection schemes (dual disk, single disk, mirror), engine protection, and controller redundancy and network redundancy, giving teams a fail-safe, solid protection scheme that can cover for drive failures. The underlying hardware must also provide redundant power, cooling, network interfaces and protection for any active component. Ideally, software-defined storage would also allow high availability to be a configuration option to allow addition of redundant components to a previously installed system. This is a huge benefit for media companies because if a small “pilot” grows to become the next “big thing,” the system can be made high availability after the initial install.

security: Software-defined storage also needs to protect media assets, giving teams control over read, read/write, or no access to workspaces via user and group permissions. It should ensure only those authorized to access content are able to do so and allow choosing the optimal data protection for each workspace. And security is not just about protecting media assets via access. It’s also about peace of mind.




affordability: Software-defined storage is also an intelligent media storage solution because it’s a smart choice from an economic impact perspective. It yields cost savings, giving teams the ability to mix and match components to meet not only their needs, but also budget requirements now and in the future. Software-defined storage should be an economical, modular solution, enabling the integration of all storage resources together into one virtualizable pool. Virtualizing storage enables lower operational costs by eliminating the complexity and cost of managing multiple, disparate storage systems, while reducing labor-intensive operations.

Now that we have looked at the value proposition of software-defined storage in greater detail, the first question that crops up is whether such a solution optimized for video production workflows even exists today.

A software-defined storage solution isn’t just a pipe dream. The market is moving rapidly to help content owners not just overcome the challenges they face today, but to also future-proof themselves as we have discussed so far. The newly released Avid NEXIS solution is a great example of the vendor community stepping up to the plate and proactively addressing market needs. Avid NEXIS is a highly adaptable storage solution and the foundation of the Avid MediaCentral platform, which unifies all compatible Avid and third-party products and services. It is intelligent storage for real-time media production. It is “intelligent” in that software-defined virtualized storage provides the mechanism to manage your video production however, whenever, wherever, and with whomever you want. Real-time media production is the most bandwidth and capacity-intensive storage application around, particularly when collaborating with a large team. Intelligent storage through software-defined storage, as seen through the Avid NEXIS example, is real and here. It delivers flexibility, control, and extensibility to applications to streamline, expand, and accelerate video production workflows.

the last word

To say that the media & entertainment market is in the midst of massive digital transformation doesn’t capture the magnitude of the change. Through this paper we have explored how content explosion fueled by ubiquitous connectivity and device proliferation is putting immense pressure on media workflows for greater agility, collaboration and optimization. However, despite massive investment, the critical storage architecture to enable all of this is still scattered, lacks interoperability and is deployed tactically—not strategically. It lacks the intelligence to provide the sort of flexibility the media ecosystem so desperately needs.

The great news is that the storage marketplace today is looking at leveraging and delivering on the promise of software-defined storage to address the industry challenges highlighted in this paper. Exploring the example of Avid NEXIS, we have seen how intelligent and agile media storage ensures maximum flexibility with consistent performance, reliability, and security regardless of network size.

For content creators, software-based intelligent media storage solutions provide the flexibility and usability needed to find assets and meet deadlines. It empowers people involved in the production process to get the access and performance needed to collaborate in real time and meet any production challenge. For technical professionals, this type of intelligent media storage provides the reliability and security needed to ensure production keeps moving. For business leaders, it provides the adaptability, simplicity, and affordability needed for business growth. The value proposition that software-defined storage brings to the table is therefore undeniable.

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Call to aCtion

Before you set this paper aside, answer the following yes/no questions:

Do You neeD to... ROLE Y N

…adapt quickly to unpredictable changes? All

…manage every facet of your workflow with ease? All

…secure assets with the utmost reliability? All

…eliminate complexity and lower costs? All

…get performance/power on demand? All

…enable real-time collaboration with anyone, anywhere? All

…accelerate workflows with industry-proven technology? All

…get the same proven workflows trusted by the industry? Content Creator

…work with the assets, tools, and people you want? Content Creator

…collaborate more effectively and seamlessly? Content Creator

…enjoy the benefits of a true cloud platform? Content Creator

…manage your system with ease? Technical Professional

…scale workspaces and resources on the fly? Technical Professional

…lower cost and complexity? Business Leader

…optimize the value of media assets? Business Leader

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you owe it to yourself and your organization to start exploring software-defined storage. The industry is changing rapidly, and your ability to survive and thrive depends on being nimble enough to meet market expectations with a dynamic workflow optimized for the media landscape of tomorrow.

[email protected]

SILICON VALLEY331 E. Evelyn Ave., Suite 100

Mountain View, CA 94041

Tel 650.475.4500

Fax 650.475.1570

SAN ANTONIO

7550 West Interstate 10,

Suite 400

San Antonio, TX 78229

Tel 210.348.1000

Fax 210.348.1003

LONDON4 Grosvenor Gardens

London SW1W 0DH

Tel +44 (0)20 7343 8383

Fax +44 (0)20 7730 3343

AucklandBahrainBangkokBeijingBengaluruBuenos AiresCape TownChennaiDammamDelhiDetroitDubaiFrankfurtHerzliyaHoustonIrvineIskander Malaysia/Johor BahruIstanbulJakartaKolkataKotte ColomboKuala LumpurLondonManhattan

MiamiMilanMoscowMountain ViewMumbaiOxfordParisPuneRockville CentreSan AntonioSão PauloSeoulShanghaiShenzhenSingaporeSydneyTaipeiTokyoTorontoValbonneWarsaw

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Future-proofing Media Workflows through Software-defined Storage