Symply Announces Sale Of Fibre Channel Shared Storage System

Symply has announced the sale and installation of a high performance fibre channel shared storage system for Madrid-based Drago Broadcast Services, part of Grupo Secuoya.

When Drago determined that it needed a new solution to ensure storage performance and resilience, it turned to Tangram Solutions, also of Madrid, and Symply.

Tangram firstly installed a 600TB Infortrend NAS with 40Gb Ethernet interfaces, offering sufficient capacity to store all the Raw assets and act as a common repository for Drago Broadcast Services’ and their different departments, including: ingest, low-res transcoding, editing, and post-production. The NAS is also used to keep online copies of materials, this data is then automatically backed up on to an LTO Tape library following pre-set policies, and these assets can then be transported and archived outside the facilities. This is easily achieved by having a single centralised NAS storage unit.

Once the NAS was operative the SAN system was installed to serve the different editors, the configuration consists of the main server (SymplyULTRA) linked to a complementary one (SymplyIO) that provides additional processing and bandwidth to the system. This is in combination with two expansions, increasing transfer rates and storage capacity to reach the nearly 400 TB of storage required, and up to 6GB/s aggregate transfer rates.

Secuoya Group Operations Director, Raúl Pino Vaquerizo, said: "The challenge was to give high-speed access to artists who perform parallel real-time colour correction and colour grading, while giving access to the same materials for quality control or file delivery to customers. We determined that the performance and resilience of the hardware and reliability of the software the Symply uses (i.e., the Quantum StorNext® on Linux CentOS 7) would ensure that Drago Broadcast Services would never have to turn away work or risk missing deadlines."

The demanding formats used today require a system that offers high transfer rate ratios so that play-outs and editing in 2K and 4K are fluid. This enables artists to carry out their projects more efficiently. A major advantage of the Symply system is its cross-platform compatibility, which allows its clients to use their preferred OS and tools. This, in turn, means that there is no need to change the operators’ workflow as it is easily integrated into existing processes.

Vaquerizo added: "Formats are evolving in such a way that image quality is improving continuously to meet the users' demands. Therefore, the need to be able to work with increasingly large files is becoming one of the most important issues to consider in any installation."

Symply resolves this issue with installations that are future proof by allowing not only up-scaling storage capacity to several petabytes, but fully scaling-out by increasing also the system’s bandwidth. The ability to scale to over 35GB/s throughput while maintaining the same low latency eliminates any worries of not being able to meet audiovisual industry demands now, or in the future.

The increasingly high amount of data stored in single volumes requires an additional security layer. Symply's patented RAID structure provides virtual protection against multiple hard drive failures in multiple RAID sets with no data loss. It also provides for an accelerated drive rebuild, thus reducing the possibility of cascading drive failure.

Tangram Solutions' priority was to optimise Drago Broadcast Services workflow to eliminate any bottle necks. The collaborative workflow facilitated by the Symply system enabled different users to simultaneously work with the same materials, speeding up the processes necessary to complete a wide range and number of complex projects.