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Watch an interview with Mark Lemmons, Chief Technology Officer, Thought Equity Management, Inc.
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Information lifecycle management strategy helps leading stock footage company scale exponentially.
Business issues
On Thought Equity’s Web site, customers research, preview and download post-production quality video content. Customers click on a selection and view a proxy of the clip. They can then download an editable comp. If it works for their application, they can buy the master clip. When the company turned to the video market in 2003, storage became an issue. With their previous solution, masters were kept on DVDs in a true archive offline. Everything else was kept on disk. But in a year’s time, at least half the library would be high-definition, and they expected to grow to more than a petabyte. Longer form and high-definition content couldn’t be stored on DVDs. No matter how much storage they had, there would never be enough. So the solution had to scale.
Solutions
Thought Equity needed both online and nearline access. The company uses L20 tape libraries with LTO Ultrium Generation 2 tape drives to take content from customer or supplier sites. They transport the LTO tape drives to the data center. There, they put the proxies on the D280 disk system (now called FlexLine™ FLX280 enterprise storage system). They put the comps on the BladeStore B220 disk system (SATA) and the masters into the L700 tape library. When a user looks at a clip on the Web site, the proxy is delivered from the fastest storage — the D280s with their 15,000 r.p.m. drives. When a user downloads a comp, the B220s deliver them faster than most users’ bandwidths. The many-megabyte master is stored on tape. McDATA Sphereon 4500 fabric switches connect all of the systems to the storage in a storage area network (SAN).
Financial benefits
If a purchase doesn’t include any extra licensing issues, a customer can complete the transaction by downloading the master online without any human intervention. This helps save on labor costs. By increasing the speed with which the company can take in content and deliver it, they are becoming more profitable. CTO Mark Lemmons says, “We’ve probably quadrupled how fast we can take content in, and we’re not done improving that yet, based on our new solution with StorageTek.”
Business benefits
Thought Equity competes because of how fast they can scale and take in content, and how fast they can deliver to their customers. StorageTek also provided Front Porch Digital software. This software manages both metadata and media content to a deeper layer of granularity than just the asset itself. Using the time code for the five-second clip in a one-hour video allows a partial restore of that piece. Instead of having to restore the whole one hour and then using an editing system to isolate the clip, the software can pull the five seconds right out of the data file in the tape library. So this software provides a live archive.
Technology benefits
A client may have a 12,000-hour library that can’t physically be shipped. So the equipment is flown to the site. There, content is digitized and stored on the L20 library. The data tapes are shipped to Thought Equity’s refinery. “In two days we can take in 60 hours of content,” Lemmons explained. “We plan to use the L700 until we move into a new facility being constructed in Laramie, Wyoming. And if we decide to scale up to the StreamLine™ SL8500 modular library system, we can just migrate the drives into the new library and go.”
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“We have the flexibility to store content in a variety of ways and retrieve it in a
variety of ways. That flexibility helps in every aspect of our business. We’ve been
thrilled with StorageTek.”
Mark Lemmons, Chief Technology Officer, Thought Equity Management, Inc.
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