overview
Founded in 1989, Lucas Oil is a manufacturer and distributor of top selling automotive oil, additives and lubricants. Lucas Oil has long been directly involved in the American racing industry and the company is a ubiquitous presence in the motorsports world, owning a production studio and a television channel dedicated to grassroots motor racing at all levels. Lucas Oil Production Studios serves four major networks, including Lucas owned-and-operated MAVTV, which mainly airs programming for automotive enthusiasts.
We have a vast amount of source footage and high resolution content to manage. Our BlackPearl enables us to manage and contain costs as we grow. The migration from our legacy SGL system was so easy and non-disruptive that we are now considering replacing our disaster recovery operation with a Spectra solution.
The Challenge
Lucas Oil Production Studios produce and edit more than 300 hours of original, high-definition motorsports programming, utilizing over 30 full-time in-house editors and 45 editing bays with Avid Technology. Their highly trained staff of graphics designers, 3D animators and editors produce over 20 hours of new programming weekly, creating everything from TV commercials, to full high-end TV shows. The production company ingests vast amounts of source footage, and as they grew and had to manage more content, they required an efficient way to store nearly 500 TB of content long-term, and searched for a solution to replace and migrate their SGL content.
The Solution
Lucas Oil chose to deploy a Spectra® BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform to replace their legacy SGL system. The object-based BlackPearl offers a multi-tenant platform that manages content on both on-premise and cloud storage targets. With the help of BlackPearl’s data policies, copies of data are tiered to Amazon® S3 Glacier and the Spectra tape library for long-term storage. Using Spectra® RioBroker software, BlackPearl imports all original LTFS content from SGL to a different library or to a separate partition in the same library, from which Avid can restore directly. Spectra RioBroker works transparently in the background, without disrupting production operations. Their new solution ingests high-resolution footage through Root6 and stores it to a nearline Spectra® BlackPearl® NAS, which sends those assets to the BlackPearl object platform for long-term retention. Root6 also creates proxy copies that are moved down to Avid for editorial use. The high-resolution version is later conformed to match the finished edit. Avid Interplay sends the completed project to BlackPearl for long-term storage.
Environment Snapshot
- Spectra BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform
- Spectra RioBroker version 1.01
- Spectra BlackPearl NAS
- Spectra Tape Library
- Two LTO-7 half-height tape drives
- Two LTO-8 half-height tape drives
- BlueScale® Encryption
- Avid Interplay PAM
- Root6
