reasons for this; lowering the cost of IT support in
creative facilities allows those facilities to spend
more on the systems and people that produce
revenue. The storage system in a creative facility
is much more integral to daily production than in
an office environment, where most documents
are cached locally and little pressure is placed on
the speed of the repository.
Standard network-attached storage is designed
to utilize the same technology that’s installed by
default on all desktop workstations. It’s the ubiq-
uitous network share, the fabric interwoven into
every modern facility that allows me to be writing
this document to a file that doesn’t exist on my
local computer. It provides connectivity across
departments and time zones. With the right IP
address, you can access anything, if you have
enough time to wait for a response.
Artists however, rely on edit-in-place networks to
be fast, and highly available, with low latency and
sustained throughput at high traffic levels, or the
deadline isn’t hit, and the facility doesn’t get paid.
Because of this, the artists in a creative facility are
far more attuned to the behavior of the storage
system, and often are the ones making the call to
tech support when things aren’t right.
If we agree that enterprise storage products are
normally inappropriate for the creative facility, we
have to think that enterprise storage workflow
also has its problems. If you open a document
from your office server and for some reason
you’re unable to save your changes, you may sim-
ply rename it and save it to a different location.
This would be fine for an office document but
imagine doing this with project files in a creative
facility - with gigabytes and terabytes worth of
video, audio, and project metadata renamed and
spread around randomly. This is where permis-
sions stop being a workflow enabler and become
a workflow obstacle. Enterprise networks follow
the same rules of permissions as your office net-
work. Authentication, ownership, and group poli-
cies will determine whether the file you require is
available to you.
Dedicated, content-creation storage networks
that apply high-level permissions based on proj-
ect assignment and keep file-level system permis-
sions to a minimum will avoid enterprise workflow
72 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com
obstacles. This is called project-based volume
workflow, and it’s been a tenant of postproduc-
tion content creation for decades. From small,
one-person shops to huge unscripted television
content factories, volume assignment based on
access to the required data for the job at hand is
the most secure and efficient method of storage
allocation. When a volume management system
allows for quick and easy creation, size change
and provisioning of storage assets, it’s clear t