Media & Entertainment Content Management

<p>Here, we’re a strong play against Isilon as the legacy solution (examples include Eurosport and Dailymotion). Universally, customers and prospects who are using Isilon tell us that they’re tired of being held hostage by it: cost and lock-in are huge issues. Scality wins based on TCO and on our customer success stories in the space.<br /> Another “take-out” example is Deluxe OnDemand, based in San Diego. They were storing their full media content catalog at the CDN/Edge layer (Akamai). That created pain points including:<br /> <strong>Cost:</strong>&nbsp;they were paying to store content to a 3rd party CDN/Edge.<br /> <strong>Lock-in:</strong>&nbsp;this is lock-in of a different sort than we usually talk about. Because content was on Akamai, it couldn’t be shared with other CDN/Edge providers (Limelight, Edgecast …), so monetization opportunities were reduced.<br /> Being tied to one CDN/Edge provider means inheriting their limitations, which could be overcome by having options.<br /> Deluxe and Scality have built an Origin Server to store Deluxe OnDemand’s media content catalog, eliminating the pain points: reducing the TCO and enabling increased revenue by enabling content to be shared across multiple CDN/Edge providers.</p>  

<p>Appliances do have deployment advantages at smaller scale, but SDS like Scality grows in efficiency as the system scales. You can scale to tens of petabytes and still administer the system with only one FTE. Decoupling the data protection from the hardware enables greater durability as well – a big issue in this industry. Maintenance can be on a rolling basis with no loss of availability, and hardware can be replaced and added with no downtime and complete flexibility in hardware choice.</p>  

<p>The Scality RING supports application-driven encryption, and object-level encryption for its object interface. This provides greater flexibility when it comes to deployment and key management.</p>  

<p>The Scality RING is an object store at its core, offering both native object protocol access (S3, HTTP REST, CDMI) and file system protocols (NFS, SMB, FUSE). By leveraging object storage, we don’t hit traditional file system inode limitations that other storage systems do (as with building multiple NAS heads, which becomes very difficult to manage at the multi- petabyte scale).<br /> At the lower layer, all chunks are stored via HTTP request (PUT, GET, DELETE) and leverage a unique key identifier coded on 160 bits. A single RING addressable namespace is near limitless, at 2^160.<br /> There is no limit to the number of files that can be stored on the RING, or to the number of storage nodes/disks that can be added to a RING cluster, allowing you to grow from 1 or 2PBs to 10s or 100s of PBs.</p>

<p>Hardware failures happen, so they need to be part of the plan. The Scality RING is designed with that eventuality in mind—and has been from the start. If (really, when) a disk fails, or even an entire chassis goes down, the RING’s architecture ensures that no data is lost, and that all data remains available, so monetization opportunity is optimized.</p>  

<p>Scality RING is a disk-based solution with all the benefits of random access. Multiple streams and connectors can be deployed for higher performance.<br /> The RING achieves exceptional performance by parallelizing operations, performance grows linearly with the capacity. A write cache mechanism allows faster acknowledge to applications.</p>

<p>The Scality RING is designed to expect and manage a wide range of component failures including disks, servers, networks – even across multiple data centers – while ensuring that data remains durable and available under these conditions. The RING provides data durability through a set of flexible data protection mechanisms optimized for distributed systems, including replication, erasure coding and geo- replication capabilities that allow applications to select the best data protection strategies for their data. These flexible data protection mechanisms exploit Scality’s design principle to address a wide spectrum (80%) of storage workloads and data sizes.</p>  

<p>The Motion Picture Association of America publishes MPAA Best Practices Guidelines for Content Security. These guidelines are centered on securing intellectual property. They list their guiding principles as these, which are fairly basic, succinct data storage goals:</p>

<p>Don’t lose content.</p>

<p>Don’t let someone steal content.</p>

<p>If content is lost or stolen, report it immediately.</p>

<p>Don’t let security measures disrupt production.</p>

<p>For the most part, the specifics of the best practices have more to do with facilities than with the storage system itself, so a cloud storage solution would need to address MPAA Best Practices. Scality’s robust, flexible software-defined storage can help.</p>  

<p>Scality is deployed in Nearline archival applications as well. It’s a good fit as a Nearline/ SAN Staging area between their Tier 1 SAN and LTO tapes, even eliminating the need to keep LTO tapes for archive. Scality RING simplifies complex workflows and makes data more available than tape, without using costlier Tier 1 SAN.</p>

<p>Ingest new incoming content on the RING instead of on the Tier1 SAN.</p>

<p>Keep long term archive of content on the RING.</p>

<p>Can even back up Tier 1 SAN in a pinch for some transcoding or even streaming.</p>

<p>In this use case, the RING is really an extension to Tier1 SAN that allows you to control its utilization and make adding to expensive Tier1 SAN unnecessary.</p>