Media & Entertainment production houses have a high-priority job to do - feeding the creative process, VFX artists, render farms, grading and finishing without delaying any of the process through administration.

These facilities will have many creative disciplines, many different types of software and often a lot of technology and storage islands to service them all. Storage islands, such as a full Storage Area Network (SAN) or SAN-in-a-can applications, can result in huge amounts of duplication and time spent data wrangling. This problem is compounded as there will be a constant pressure to stop these buckets of storage from overflowing as these facilities work on multiple shots, scenes and projects concurrently.

This whitepaper will explore the current status-quo for production houses, the ‘why’ behind the industry trust in SANs, and how moving to technologies, such as NAS, can liberate data and media workflows.

Post production, creative agencies and facilities that work with raw camera footage and compressed video often fall into the trap of purchasing a SAN when one wasn’t needed in the first place. Because of its low latency and high bandwidth, SAN has provided a degree of reassurance for facilities looking to handle increasingly higher file sizes and data-rates.

However, for facilities investing into SAN to remain competitive, efficient and scalable, the infrastructure comes with prohibitively high manpower and infrastructure costs to manage and maintain.

This whitepaper explores the many moving parts within the modern production environment for creative agencies and how NAS technology, combined with DIT tools, will be the next step to scaling users and processes into operating on a facility-wide shared storage.