Spectra Logic is a great company to work with, offering superior products and outstanding customer support. We are very pleased with the capacity, speed and reliability of our system, as well as its ability to integrate seamlessly into our existing production environment.
The Challenge
Post-production organizations today are experiencing a significant increase in the need for digital storage. With the volume and quality of media growing, files are getting larger and larger, and media companies are finding themselves accumulating, distributing and storing massive amounts of content.
Post Op Group was no exception to this trend. They needed a highly scalable solution that would provide their internal departments with quick and easy access to assets. Additionally, they required a system that would integrate effortlessly with their Avid editorial environment and offer a staging area for production content that needed to be consolidated and organized prior to being archived. They were also hoping to replace their previous system, as it was too complex to setup and maintain and wasn’t accessible by non-IT staff for restores or archives.
The Solution
Post Op Group initially purchased a Spectra Tape Library and two Spectra NAS Solutions in 2013 to manage its digital assets. Four years later, the organization integrated a Spectra® BlackPearl® Hybrid Storage Platform into its environment, primarily for archiving purposes, and upgraded to a newer Spectra Tape Library. Post Op Group uses its BlackPearl, along with the BlackPearl® Eon Browser, to archive finished production projects and associated media to its tape library. They send anywhere from 1TB to 20TB of data per production to BlackPearl, every three to six months, and are storing more than 100TB total. They greatly appreciate the ease of setup and access that BlackPearl offers, specifically in comparison to their previous system. Together, BlackPearl and Spectra NAS act as a nearline solution for editorial purposes, affording Post Op Group the staging area they desired for production content and also easily sending finished assets to tape. The organization was pleased to learn that their BlackPearl was able to integrate with their disk environment, via the Spectra NAS’s network file interface (NFI). This feature makes archiving quick and simple and also gives the organization an immediate backup copy on tape for disaster recovery purposes (if required). The new solution streamlines the storage process, offering end-to-end integration from primary storage to long-term tape archive.
Post Op recently added an additional Spectra NAS solution to its environment. The third NAS unit is currently serving files locally at another offsite location.
Environment Snapshot
- BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform
- BlackPearl Eon Browser
- Three Spectra NAS Solutions, 4U
- Spectra Tape Library
- LTO-6 Drives and Media
- Avid Editing Software
