Editing Out Inefficiency To Handle 20TB A Day

StorNext Helps New Zealand Film Facility Conquer up to 20TB a Day

Park Road Post Production, a premier facility for filmmakers located in New Zealand, has worked on some of the largest-budget Hollywood films, as well as independent and New Zealand features. It takes massive amounts of digital data to get to a finished product, so Park Road adopted StorNext software for data management. The result: Park Road stays on top of today’s demanding digital workflows and the growing amount of associated content. 

Drowning in Data

The challenge that Park Road faced was scaling its systems to accommodate the rapid increase in data that digital filmmaking now generates. The traditional tools used to manage the content are often overwhelmed by the demands of data acquisition, collaboration, distribution, and archiving. Fast turnaround is a key factor in motion picture production, so Park Road’s ability to help filmmakers maximize their creative time is a significant competitive advantage.

“We realized that we would need to dramatically increase our throughput and capacity to meet the potential demand,” says Phil Oatley, Head of Technology for Park Road. “On one project, each shoot day would see us process an average of six to twelve terabytes of new material, and on a really busy day this could reach twenty terabytes. All new material needed to be processed and delivered to the client within twelve hours.”

In short, Park Road was faced with the prospect of “drowning in data.” The facility needed a solution with speed, efficiency, and scalability.

Park Road already was familiar with the effectiveness of Quantum technology, having used Quantum StorNext FX for non-Apple SAN clients and a Quantum Scalar tape library for archiving. At the recommendation of Park Road’s technology partner, Factorial, the facility decided to implement a larger Quantum solution composed of full-scale StorNext software and a Scalar i6000 enterprise tape library.

Benefits: Scalability, Speed

The Quantum solution allows Park Road to easily scale up without needing to re-architect its IT infrastructure. The StorNext File System now delivers high-performance file access, supporting heterogeneous environments including Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems.

Park Road uses StorNext Storage Manager to automatically move data between high-performance disk and a large-capacity tape library archive. In addition, the Scalar i6000 provides a substantial increase in the amount of data that can be kept for near-term re-evaluation or processing as well as long-term archive.

After the integration was complete, performance increased substantially for Park Road. The system at Park Road routinely processes multiple terabytes of data in just a matter of hours and can handle in excess of 20TB per day at peak load.