Deakin University is a large and diverse institution which consists of four campuses throughout Victoria. The university has a strong focus on their Bachelor of Creative Arts, Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communications) and Bachelor of Film and Digital Media with majors in film, photography and animation, and on the Visual Arts Degrees incorporating illustration and design.

Network Storage Upgrade

Deakin University's need to upgrade their network storage architecture arose as a result of their IT department looking at ways to enhance the quality of their Media courses. Their main aim was simplifying the staff processes relating to the distribution of learning materials. Having looked at numerous solutions, Editshare appeared to be the best fit for the specific workflow bandwidth needs and for the ability to take advantage of the existing Gigabit Ethernet network infrastructure.

Pictured is Digistor Account Manager, Spiro Vladimiroski (L), with Deakin Faculty of Arts Film & Digital Media Technician, Robert Pitman (R). The rack mounted EditShare units can be seen behind them.

Deakin University EditShare is a family of shared storage solutions for editing workgroups. Supporting offline to uncompressed HD, EditShare products are designed to maximize media sharing and storage for multi-user editing environments. Leveraging Gigabit Ethernet, EditShare is simple to install, easy to use and can offer an rapid return on investment for any media-driven organisation.

The EditShare solution was purchased from Digistor in December 2008 to be implemented in time for students commencing in February 2009. It consisted of two Editshare 8U systems with a total of 80 drives which now gives Deakin Unversity flexibility to coordinate learning material in a shared environment.

With complete control over student user permissions, the Editshare solution is ideal for management of Deakin Universities student / class turnover which takes place on a semester by semester basis.

Deakin has a twenty-eight computer system lab for lectures and has a further fifteen systems in rooms which the students can use at any time. All of these systems are running Final Cut Pro and are connected to the EditShare storage.

Substantial Benefits

Deakin has realised substantial benefits using the EditShare solution, including

Centralising all storage with file level sharing to allow all users access to the necessary media spaces without having to duplicate project files
Students can move from Final Cut Pro edit stations to the Pro Tools recording studio and to the Pro Tools 5.1 mixing space, all with one simple logon
Simple management of the Media classes from first to third year with allocation of student hard drive capacity with a click of a button
Increased bandwidth, allowing students to all work on their HD projects simultaneously without dropped frames
In case of drive failure, the RAID5 protection allows administrators to swap-out a failed drive without interrupting operation
Standard Gigabit Ethernet technology enables the university to add users and workstations as they need to at no cost by utilising existing network infrastructure

For further information

To find out about EditShare solutions for your installation, contact Digistor.