From a business perspective, having more is always better. More money is good, more business is good, more production is good, having more projects is good, more opportunity is always good.
It's the same with technology; more processing power is better, more RAM is better, having more workstations to do the job is preferred.
How about more storage? Is it better to have more storage?
4 out of 5 customers prefer to have more storage in order to cater for growing production data. 4 out of 5 customers strongly believe that more capacity in shared storage is the solution to their growing assets and disk space problems.
I’m going to point out 2 misconceptions in this scenario:
- Growing Assets is a problem – while this statement is half correct, it is not entirely true. Growing the volume of assets is a reality and is part of the production lifecycle.
- Disk space is a problem and growing your capacity will solve this – this is false. It is very common that when you double your storage capacity, you give your facility twice as much storage to fill up and you end up with the same situation you were in.
Problems with Disk Space are a result of poor data management in an age where growing assets is inevitable. However even before the age of big data and fast growing assets, we still see this issue with disk space and the need to have more capacity. The main reason for this is the failure to understand the basics of Data Life-cycle.
Below is a generic overview of Data Life-cycle
It is simple, what comes in must come out.
In a Post Production/Broadcast environment, a similar approach can be used.
"Generate" is your Ingest/Acquisition of assets
"Use" is your actual Production of material
"Transfer and Transform" is your Transcode and Delivery of content
"Store" is your Snapshot or Backup for Disaster recovery
"Archive" is consolidating completed projects and material and putting them "on the shelf"
"Restore" is when we need to revise projects that are off the system
"Destroy" is when the contract is done and there is no need to keep client data for future use.
A good strategy to enable your Data Life-cycle is not to invest in large capacity storage, but instead a combination of fast, cheap and offsite storage along with an asset management to increase efficiency, reliability and effectiveness of your workflow.
Having a good understanding and implementation of a Data Life-cycle Management will ensure you can achieve more production, deliver more projects and exploit more opportunities with just the right amount of technology.
Digistor specialises in shared storage solutions in production environments with a strong understanding of Data Lifecycle management and Media Asset Management. If managing data and workflow is an important part in your business, call us and speak with a Digistor Consultant.