predominantly generic on-premises storage that isn’t optimized for the rigor required for typical media and entertainment workflows. New storage deployments are used as tactical point solutions to meet an immediate need instead of being geared for scalability or interoperability—the two biggest demands of tomorrow’s video workflows.
Physical storage requires resources to manage it and make it accessible to production teams. Managing storage via software running on industry-standard hardware is the fundamental value proposition of software-defined storage. The numerous benefits of software-defined storage include:
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 work-space’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 futureproof 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 adapts 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 collab-oration, giving teams the ability to accelerate production by connecting with hundreds of other content contributors simultaneously. An ideal software-defined storage solution should work with all top media creation applications.
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
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