January 4, 2011, Storage Visions Las Vegas-Jeff Lowe, COO of Building 4 Media, talked about converting a broadcast studio into a digital flow in his presentation titled "bigger and more expensive doesn't always mean better". He noted that enterprise-class storage systems are not suitable for media operations.

After spending 10 years of Apple, and thinking he had learned everything about digital video, Lowe moved to the broadcast industry to help them convert to digital flow. The broadcast market has been changing dramatically in the last few years, so his first job was to build a new facility from the ground up. This was envisioned to be a catalyst for moving into digital production.

One of the goals for this facility was to recover legacy assets from film and linear editing processes. To this, there is a required buy-in from all parties and also the need to position yourself as a watchdog to figure out what you missed and how to correct it. Developing an archive system was the key to the whole endeavor, but faced many challenges. The holy grail of the conversion was to tie a time slice per frame and metadata together in an automated asset management system.

Some of the components for this transition included the traditional hardware, cameras, recorders, audio and video mixers, etc. The challenge was to get all of this equipment interoperating with the new digital flows. On paper, the new storage systems had sufficient capacity and bandwidth to handle all the data requirements. The storage system was mapped into their new HD sports workflow

Their first system had multiple types of storage and many client functions. They quickly found, however, that they needed more flexibility, because ingest and edit are both in real-time but have totally different flows. There are many overlapping operations like transcoding to allow data to migrate between the two flows.

This first system was a big box storage array that was supposed to be a scalable, enterprise-class system. It cost a lot of money but was tapeless, so there was no archive on ingest. The vendor claimed he could support an end-to-end multistream high definition workflow with fast access for replay. It didn't work.

They found that when the storage system stuttered, the workflow stopped. The vendor then suggested they buy more equipment to provide greater buffer space to handle multiple data streams. The vendor also suggested that they virtualize the system.

Media and entertainment people have a different view of storage than most data centers. Therefore it is important to work with a storage vendor that has appropriate domain expertise. A media storage system is not really about I./O, IOPS,…, but about workflow. They found a new vendor with video-specific expertise and build something new storage system. Now, ingest from disk-based cameras goes into edit SAN which supports workflow. The major difference is the new system works on large data streams rather than small amounts of data. The system is running 1.25 petabytes storage array and has a 8 Gb/s total bandwidth.

They determined that they need speed, qulaity, and low cost in their storage systems, but also need failover capabilities to keep production alive. The lessons they learned include the need to understand the real needs of the work flow detail level. Best practices have to evolve rapidly as technology changes. The transition from analog-to-digital is very hard and the transition from standard for high-definition is even harder so any new production facility should be designed for next-generation and beyond capabilities. Systems must be planned and built for the extremes or peaks of today's workflows.

The production people don't care about the technology, they just want to be able to do their work. Looking beyond HD, new formats on the horizon include 2K, 4K and 3-D HD. These new formats will include even larger volumes of data and an analogy would be today's HD flows require moving lots of pebbles but the future flows will be like moving boulders. Developing storage systems for media and entertainment requires consultants and vendors who have relevant experience.