Entertainment studios supply their customers with some of the most valuable data in the world.
It falls to those customers to protect that data because, all too often, they only get one copy when they license it.
From archiving to remastering, source files can cost millions of dollars to maintain. Keeping a top-fidelity, ultra-high-resolution licensed copy safe is the first priority for distributors and broadcasters — but that’s only the beginning.
Optimal User Experience VS Bandwidth Conservation
Once a master copy arrives, the broadcaster service needs to make the content digestible by consumers.
Digital rights management (DRM) must be added to comply with both owner and industry requirements. Then the service must transcode the source material into various qualities, known as a “bitrate ladder.” This applies to both video and audio.
Generally, every title undergoes analysis to arrive at a bitrate ladder suited to its content. The profiles for simple animation and complex, fast live-action will be markedly different. Broadcasters maintain potentially dozens of versions of each content item, dynamically switching between them based on the consumer’s device characteristics and changing connectivity conditions.
It’s a never-ending competition between optimal user experience and bandwidth conservation for reduced delivery costs.
The Importance of Storage for Entertainment Streaming
Just as importantly, broadcasters frequently divide content into smaller, more wieldy chunks, which makes for more flexible transmission and network load balancing.
These chunks need to move from the broadcaster to content distribution network (CDN) nodes, which then cache the content more locally relative to consumers.
Clearly, storage plays a pivotal role throughout this process and at each level. Storage solutions need to be fast in both streaming bandwidth as well as in the ability to field many concurrent I/O requests.
Simultaneously, storage solutions need to be both capacious and resilient against downtime to maximize solution ROI and customer satisfaction. And uptime alone is not enough.
When data value is this critical, files need to be secured and verified throughout their life cycles.
Enter Quobyte’s Real Software Storage
Quobyte has worked hard to engineer its storage platform for excellence on all these criteria.
From NVMe-based, all-flash caching and metadata servers to 4U servers with 60 or more hard drives, off-the-shelf hardware running Quobyte provides the needed mix of scale-out performance and capacity needed for robust media distribution from core to edge.
Solutions support Linux, Windows, Mac, and S3, integrating complete fault tolerance, encryption, and end-to-end data checksum validation to safeguard media assets across all locations.
Quobyte is scalable to hundreds of petabytes, but because the solution uses industry-standard architectures and commodity hardware, operators can deploy public cloud-class infrastructure in their private cloud with equivalent reliability and far greater affordability.
Quobyte is an ideal origin store for CDNs.
A broadcaster tracking millions or billions of storage blocks faces exceptional data complexity. This hampers media transcoding operations (bitrate laddering).
Data complexity also requires a large memory footprint and can incur significant inter-node cache synchronization headaches.
Because Quobyte’s architecture is highly parallelized, it’s well equipped to handle and sync billions of files across clusters. This is part of what makes Quobyte software storage a valuable asset in any highly scaled media strategy spanning a CDN.
Without Quobyte, broadcasters and distributors are likely using a less scalable solution with poorer ROI.
Quobyte is built for hyperscale growth, real-time performance, and affordability founded on commodity hardware. With Quobyte, it becomes cost-advantageous to bring storage back from outsourced cloud providers, and there’s no extra management needed for specialty appliance platforms.
Managing Quobyte is nearly drag-and-drop simple.
Next-generation Software Storage
IDC predicts that entertainment data will account for 40% of all global data by 2024.
Demand is fierce, and consumers want only the best experiences. There’s no room for error in the storage chain from master files to people’s homes.
Next-generation software storage from Quobyte will keep media safe, cost-effective, and reliably excellent.
See what Quobyte can do for you and your Media and Entertainment workflow here.
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Originally posted on Quobyte’s blog on November 3, 2021.
