Solution Brief Clustered Data ONTAP for Media and Your Business NetApp at the center of media throughout your company

Key Benefits What Happened to My TV? • Infinite incremental growth The collision of show business and social media has changed everything. Viewers • Nondisruptive upgrades and scale-out today don’t want a passive “lean-back” experience. They expect to be able to select • Intelligent data migrations content from a huge library and get just what they want to watch, when they want to • Agile infrastructure for shared watch it—on any device. They expect to share clips, add commentary, and rate content. applications Audiences even want to contribute content to your service. All of these expectations • Storage efficiency through NetApp® are ushering in a whole new era of content viewing. Snapshot® copies • Five-9s availability and Integrated The content business has changed, and so has the way you need to think about not Data Protection only producing and delivering content, but also about transacting, measuring, and • Hybrid flash architectures for balancing analyzing the business. Because storage is at the very core of all of these processes, performance and capacity you need to rethink your storage strategy too. You want a storage company behind you that has the storage platforms and data management software you need. You also want the media workflow, database, virtualization, and cloud expertise you need to get to the next level of content production and distribution.

From Silos to Shared IT Storage is an integral part of media production, distribution, and business today. Traditionally, storage was installed in media facilities as a dedicated part of a specific application, such as editing, compositing, color correction, graphics creation, play-out, and so on. As applications and the number of operators exploded, “silos of storage” proliferated.

Buying silos of storage was expedient initially, but doing so created inefficiencies in the long run. In this random infrastructure scenario, applications and operators can function efficiently individually; however, in a nonlinear collaborative environment, efficiency in individual applications or processes might not result in overall workflow efficiency. This storage silo approach certainly results in additional capital expense and management overhead and, most significantly, more file transfers—and therefore file copies.

APPLICATION HISTORICAL STORAGE APPROACH

Ingest High-end SAN

Editing and compositing High-end SAN

Animation rendering NAS with cache

Transcode and distribute NAS

Archive Tape

Broadcast play-out Proprietary solutions

Table 1) Historically, media applications required dedicated storage systems. Now, almost all applications can be unified with NetApp Data ONTAP. Disadvantages of the Silo Approach “The challenge was to design a system to • Additional capital equipment expense. IT equipment manage content for multiplatform distribution required for storage interconnectivity and additional storage to satisfy the needs of the business, not only for copies of files. for our traditional TV and radio audience • Greater storage management overhead. Networked storage but also for new viewers who want a more administrative management and additional expertise and time personalized program.” related to managing multiple storage file systems and storage José María Casaos, Technical Director subsystems. Grupo Antena3 • Operational inefficiency. Production “wait time” while files are transferred. The potential savings don’t stop at the capital investment; Building flexibility and agility into your production environment consider the energy savings and reduced HVAC costs achieved and therefore the storage infrastructure that supports it has from having fewer spinning disks. Solid-state disks can be never been so important. deployed in high-performance workloads to reduce the strain on hard disk drives even further. Multiprotocol Support: a Critical Design Consideration As you grow your media enterprise storage solution, consider Workflow Optimization the various protocols necessary to support your operation. In the media landscape, from production to distribution to trans- Employing a storage system that can support , action to analysis, some data needs to be accessed repeatedly iSCSI, SAN, and NAS protocols simplifies your storage environ- and with very little latency. That is why NetApp has not one flash ment and reduces connectivity costs and overhead. solution but a suite of flash technologies that can work together or separately to enable groundbreaking results. By caching Windows clients use CIFS to access network storage, while where it is most applicable—at the host, in band, at the array and UNIX clients use NFS to access the same files. You no longer controller, or in SSDs—a NetApp architecture can balance cost, need emulation products such as SAMBA or PC-NFS to allow cache capacity, and latency. different platforms to share network files, so management of client systems is simpler and performance is improved. Storage Efficiency NetApp storage efficiency includes integrated compression One File System Can’t Do Everything and deduplication, which can shrink your capacity needs even It is true that high-resolution, real-time production represents a in media workflows. You can run the NetApp compression and dedicated workflow that is still best supported with a SAN solution deduplication simulation tool against your existing datasets focused on sequential I/O performance. For these tasks—for to determine how much efficiency your operation can expect. example, editing, compositing, and coloring—the dense, high- And yes, there is significant storage efficiency to be had, even bandwidth, modular NetApp E-Series excels (www..com/ in compressed video workflows. us/products/storage-systems/e5600/index.aspx). Integrated Data Protection For the majority of your media workflow needs, however, espe- NetApp Integrated Data Protection delivers high availability, cially media processing and distribution–related operations, and backup, compliance, and disaster recovery services directly for all of your media business needs, use the NetApp clustered from clustered Data ONTAP storage systems. The solution scales Data ONTAP® (www.netapp.com/us/solutions/ across applications and virtual infrastructures because it runs in industry/media-entertainment/index.aspx). This system has the the storage, where data lives. necessary breadth of performance, storage efficiency features, and nondisruptive operations to best support your media and Most data protection implementations are complex and costly your business in a unified environment. and require a number of specialty products to be “bolted” onto your environment. The NetApp Integrated Data Protection solu- Not All Scale-Out NAS Solutions Are Equal tion is robust and efficient, and it requires fewer server, storage, Improving your operational workflow can deliver more efficiency. and network resources. It is simple enough that you can activate Your storage solution, which forms the heart of your production and roll out services in minutes. environment, must also perform its tasks more efficiently. NetApp FAS systems consistently outperform the competition in SPEC NetApp also provides NetApp RAID DP® technology, which sfs2008 testing. However, the performance differentiation doesn’t delivers double-parity data protection with no performance stop there. Application performance is what really matters—for degradation to protect against two disk failures in a stripe group, your applications. In video transcode application testing, clustered not just one. Data ONTAP beat the legacy scale-out NAS offering by a factor of three to one—which translates to one-third the storage expense with NetApp for the same performance. Figure 1) FAS8000 series running clustered Data ONTAP.

As you consider the cost and workflow efficiency advantages Because NetApp FAS running clustered Data ONTAP is flexible, of centralized shared storage, data protection becomes more you need fewer storage systems, and you get more from each important, and the complexity can become a challenge. Storage system deployed. Fundamentally, this storage and management subsystem capabilities that deliver resiliency, protection against approach reduces storage management overhead as well as data data loss, and proactive monitoring and maintenance are key to center floor space, power, and cooling needs. Ultimately, your securing your intellectual capital. You should expect your storage next storage purchase can solve a short-term problem but add solution to deliver five-9s availability. complexity to your already overburdened operation—or it can simplify and unify your media business infrastructure. The choice Storage Management is yours. Many storage management products are limited to a single class of storage or a specific capability—or they separate management Animation and Effects Rendering of physical and virtual resources. But to keep pace with 50% or Clustered Data ONTAP is an extremely fast platform for highly greater data growth without adding staff, media operations need parallel compute applications. These applications include feature tools that drive storage management efficiency. animation and special effects rendering in which thousands of compute nodes might need to access the same graphics NetApp OnCommand® Unified Manager delivers a unified and texture elements. FAS is tuned for high-I/O performance and experience to manage physical and virtual storage environments cache flexibility with NetApp Flash Cache™ intelligent caching or using integrated workflows and policy-driven automation. From third-party memory management solutions. Animation studios a single dashboard, Unified Manager simplifies shared IT storage with many thousands of render cores trust NetApp to provide management, delivering efficiency at scale across the largest industry-leading performance for their 24/7 render farms. media operations. Active Archive, Central Repository The Bottom Line Studios, broadcasters, cable, and Internet media operations You need a solution that eliminates planned downtime, scales can now consolidate their storage tiers with clustered Data nondisruptively as your business grows, and quickly adapts ONTAP. The operating system provides access from all major to changing business environments. And you need a solution operating systems and storage protocols and enables tiering that is easy to manage and enables you to stay ahead of your across storage device types within a single file system. This competition. capability streamlines the storage management effort, enabling operations to manage more terabytes and even petabytes with Not all storage systems are built the same, and this becomes less engineering overhead. even more apparent when dealing with the file size and storage growth needs of media applications. Storage efficiency, Transcode and Distribute flexibility, and agility are the prominent considerations for Support large-scale adaptive bit-rate and trick-play video-on-­ media companies today. demand transcoding operations with a greatly reduced storage infrastructure. NetApp clustered Data ONTAP is tuned for the small file writes inherent in these workflows,. This feature enables up to a three-times increase in transcode operations with the same amount of storage versus that of other scale-out NAS storage­ infrastructures. 2K/4K Compositing Video Digital SAN Storage Screening Editing Intermediates NAS Storage

SAN/NAS Storage

NetApp Content E-Series Storage Delivery Network

OTT/ IPTV Input News/Sports Enterprise Transcode Video Devices Highlights Multimedia and Processing MAM Production Distribute Playout Server

Mobile/ NetApp Clustered Wireless Data ONTAP Storage Archive

Animation Analytics and Media Transactions Proxy Advertising and Subscriber Internet TV Anytime and VFX Reporting Serving Workflows Sales Management Media Services and Anywhere

Figure 2) Clustered Data ONTAP provides an agile infrastructure for animation and effects rendering, active archiving, transcoding, distribution, Internet media services, and TV, anywhere, anytime. The system also provides an agile infrastructure for shared IT to run the business. The extremely high-bandwidth E-Series is deployed for real-time high-bitrate production. Both platforms provide superior performance for media operations.

Internet Media Services TV Anywhere, Anytime Maintain large-scale media repositories, support massively Digital television delivery services are increasing their on-demand, scaled over-the-top streaming services, transact millions of personal recording, and second-screen streaming and down- queries a day, and analyze user patterns, all with one storage loading offerings. FAS clustered Data ONTAP is at the center infrastructure: the world’s #1 branded storage operating of R&D and operations at major tier 1 providers in these areas. system, Data ONTAP. Internet media services, with their vast capacity needs and massive user base, strain the bounds of an infrastructure’s capacity and throughput. Having one storage OS intelligently spanning flash, SSDs, SAS, About NetApp and SATA allows providers to best leverage the cost and Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, latency characteristics of all available storage technologies, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers even on a dynamic basis. value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future. www.netapp.com

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