Scalability & Flexibility for Post-Production Environments with a New Scale-Up, Scale-Out NAS Model

With ever-evolving media storage and workflow needs common in post-production environments, it’s important to have a solution that not only works for current projects but also helps you adjust to growth and meets a return on investment. 

With storage, the most common scalability technique is scaling up because it provides increased horsepower. When you need more capacity or more processing resources, you augment the existing solution until you max out its ability to scale up any further. At that point, you must face a critical choice: make do with a maxed-out solution, which is hardly a choice at all, or start over with another scale-up solution, which means rip out the old solution to replace it with a new one.  

The team at OpenDrives has solved for this with an all-new hardware series that delivers a scale-up architecture with scale-out performance. This gives post-production technology teams the choice of which dimension, or dimensions, they want to scale. Whether they want to increase compute power or select from more capacity options, you look to its new enterprise-grade storage solutions that focus on flexibility and scalability to meet your post-production performance. The product lineup includes: 

• The Ultimate Series which delivers the highest level of performance and throughput in the Ultra Hardware Platform. Designed with speed and low latency in mind, the Ultimate incorporates an all-flash NVMe design in the form of the F and FD capacity modules to handle the most demanding workflows.

• For post-production teams that require a balance between performance and flexibility, the Optimum Series was designed to provide freedom of choice and is configurable with either all-flash NVMe (F, FD) or SAS HDD (H, HD) capacity modules, or both. The workhorse of the Ultra Hardware Platform, the Optimum can handle resource-intensive workflows while also managing data integrity with ease. 

• The Momentum Series leverages OpenDrives’ HDD (H, HD) capacity models to deliver high performance at a cost-effective price. Designed to excel at read or write-intensive applications or nearline repositories, the Momentum provides power at a price-point to meet any budget.

All of this is tied together by OpenDrives’ Atlas software platform which allows for complete

operational transparency through a single pane of glass, and a new 2U form factor to greatly reduce footprint available starting Q4 2020. With the ability to manage all OpenDrives systems from a single interface, companies can manage their entire storage infrastructure no matter how geographically distributed it may be. Plus, Atlas seamlessly incorporates intelligent data integrity to ensure against corrupt data or data loss. New features include: inline and proactive caching, bandwidth throttling and actionable analytics to support business intelligence. 

Founded in 2011 by a veteran Hollywood team of technical media engineers, post-production professionals and studio heads, OpenDrives has maintained its commitment to solve the industry’s most critical pain points, including speed, latency, and scalability. 

“OpenDrives’ first-hand perspective on post-production performance means you get true partners who understand the importance of seamless workflows,” said Mark Dietel, CTO at SouthPark Studios. “By using their highly intuitive, reliable storage solution, we’re able to eliminate performance delays to give our creatives more time to iterate and perfect their projects. This continues to give South Park Studios a creative advantage within a competitive animation space.

Most recently, OpenDrives adapted its NAS solution to fit the transition to a remote workforce and for an industry that relies heavily on on-premise, on-lot production. In March 2020, the company introduced OpenDrives Anywhere, an in-place private cloud model that enables users to work on the same project from multiple locations, without any compromises in workflow performance, quality and security of files. 

OpenDrives’ Ultra Hardware Platform and the existing Atlas Operating System, as well as OpenDrives Anywhere, is available to existing and new customers starting today. All customers will be able to upgrade to the new Atlas software in Q4 2020. To learn more about the remote product or for a live and remote demo, email sales@opendrives.com or visit www.opendrives.com.