TURNING STORAGE
INTO A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
By ADRIAN HERRERA,
VICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETING,
CARINGO
The proliferation of broadband, cloud and mobile
devices has permanently changed the access pat-
terns of everybody in the new digital economy.
Now, storage and the assets stored are expected
to be available anywhere and from any device.
Oh…and no one wants to pay for it.
This is becoming a particularly challenging issue
in the Media and Entertainment (M&E) space
because of exponentially increasing file sizes, rap-
idly changing consumer viewing patterns (long-
tail, VOD, cord cutting, binge watching, etc.) and
the resulting expectation of content producers
for assets to remain online and instantly available
in perpetuity. M&E organizations that can satisfy
these requests get to keep their customers and
viewers. Those who can’t will ultimately lose their
customers and viewers. So how do you turn the
expectation of “free” storage and “instant” access
from a significant risk to your business into a
competitive advantage? The answer—as in many
problems driven by paradigm shifts—is in the
underlying infrastructure. The non-sexy storage
layer.
66 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com
The late Frank Zappa once said, “Change is not
only necessary, it’s inevitable.” As such, disrup-
tive technologies like object storage will become
commonplace in the M&E industry in the future.
Currently, the efficiencies of object storage are
not being utilized because workflows, processes
and applications were designed for incumbent
technologies like NAS and tape. This, however, is
changing.
To understand why it’s changing, we need to
understand why NAS and tape are no longer via-
ble as the only storage technologies in the M&E
data center. NAS is really too expensive and too
difficult to maintain. Even when it is given away
for free, on-going backup costs, maintenance
costs, data center footprint and limits in scale will
ultimately inhibit your ability to provide long-term
storage for large digital asset libraries. This reality
turned many in the M&E industry to tape, primar-
ily as an extremely low-cost form of archival stor-
age. But costs aside, not being able to categorize,
search and instantly deliver content now puts
those using tape at a competitive disadvantage.