Tecnología
Software-Defined Storage by Quantum
As media workflows evolve, so does workflow storage. Where workflow operations were primarily conducted within a single facility, proprietary storage solutions were possible. Now, with greater need for collaboration across geographically dispersed teams and with new opportunities to monetize content, there’s greater demand for a more flexible, fluid approach to workflow storage. That solution is software-defined storage.At its simplest, software-defined storage decouples storage management from the underlying hardware.
By removing physical constraints, storage resource can be used more efficiently, aligning the access requirements of the content to the type of storage most suitable in terms of performance, security, cost, and other factors. By allowing transparent access to content regardless of the hardware it’s stored on, both on-premise and off-premise storage can be combined in a single storage infrastructure seamlessly.
Going one step furtner, software-defined storage allows management and administration to be simplified through policy-based automation. This intelligent management allows content to flow from one type of hardware to another based on workflow-specific policies. For example, automation can move content from high-performance storage with SAN access for content creation, to an object storage-based digital library with NAS access for transcode or rendering, or to a cloud-based content library with compute capabilities for transcoding and rendering. In this way, facilities can move not just the content, but the media processing required for distribution, from their facility to the cloud.
More and more transcode and render farms are being built in the cloud, acting directly on content libraries pushed to the cloud and intelligently managed from the software-defined workflow storage infrastructure. Rather than buy and maintain proprietary systems to perform these processes, facilities can shift toward compute as a service. This shift already has begun, and the business model will be further refined as cloud providers continue to acquire facility-based production-tool developers.
With software-defined storage, the inflexible, monolithic storage infrastructures that workflows have relied upon will be replaced by flexible and more affordable storage solutions. The best of them will scale capacity and performance independently to meet a facility’s growing workflow storage needs, and allow the full range of storage possibilities, both in their facility and in the cloud. Once both access and management are virtualized from the physical storage, the possibilities are endless.