Premiere is a cloud-based platform built for digital retailers and broadcasters around the world to provide those users with tools they need to process, package and deliver digital content.
Like other shops operating at scale in a competitive market, Premiere Digital originally built its own Tier 2 storage system with open source technology on standard hardware. This large working archive sitting behind its media asset manager (MAM) was satisfactory in some regards, but required increasing effort to grow and maintain, did not have a large community nor documentation, and lacked several other features the Premiere tech and executive teams identified as being key to the business’s storage transformation. This system was limited to Tier 2 use cases and lacked the file and cloud API interfaces, monitoring capabilities, and tuneability required for continued success within their growing environment.
Premiere Digital’s technical team is lean and mean, with 5 employees that have specialties but must also be able to manage the business’s entire tech stack, from desktop support to their 24-rack/2MW on-site datacenter. As they began looking into new solutions, they knew that ease of deployment and use with world-class support was required.
SwiftStack is a multi-cloud storage system that independently scales access and capacity to store unstructured data behind Premiere Digital’s MAM. The storage system allows scaling of capacity and performance on-premises with the addition of standard server hardware to meet user demands. There is no advanced configuration required and with only a few simple steps, software can be installed on a new node and deployed in the cluster. Load balancing capabilities are fully integrated allowing applications to automatically take advantage of the full bandwidth of the distributed system. SwiftStack is designed to remain available under device failure scenarios. Even in the case of major disasters, given nodes of the cluster can be globally distributed, and the single namespace can include capacity in public cloud buckets.
Premiere Digital had used a Tier 1 solution for all of its transcoding, users on workstations, and all of its ingress and egress workflows. Of these three, the only one that required true low-latency storage is for its workstation users who are doing playback of multiple files on their timelines. With API access to its MAM, SwiftStack thrived in testing, and offered additional value to developers across the company who could take direct advantage of all assets stored in the system. Premiere Digital was able to transition use cases that were less latency dependent to SwiftStack as a more cost-effective storage option without negatively impacting the end user experience. “One of the things we recognized with our Tier 1 and Tier 2 storage is that there is a lot of time taken moving things back and forth between them for different projects,” said Auletta. “This removes that limitation. If something can be done completely in object, it cuts down on that copy time, it cuts down on all the other factors that are involved there, and greatly simplifies things. It adds time to our day. It allows us to actually churn out a lot more work that we want to do. Media shops with small staff should have no fear of getting started with SwiftStack.” Premiere Digital has plans to also use the built-in native file access in SwiftStack, and to leverage multi-cloud management to burst compute workloads to the cloud while retaining all the data securely on premise using HTTPS, which is something that traditional NAS systems cannot do.
For more information on SwiftStack’s features, support, pricing and product documentation, contact us.
“It's one less thing I have to stress about because it's extremely solid, easy to use for the entire team, and the performance is outstanding.”
“Re-purposing existing servers…allowed us to save because we didn't have to buy new hardware for one of our initial deployments. The technical support is good. I would rate it as a nine out of ten.”
“It's one less thing I have to stress about because it's extremely solid, easy to use for the entire team, and the performance is outstanding.”
“SwiftStack provides our business with an array of solutions to storage challenges, which helps me sleep a lot better at night. And I value that we can do server maintenance during the day without customer impact.”
“SwiftStack cut our storage management overhead for backup by over 90%...the entire process took only an hour and a half."
“SwiftStack is a “single source of truth” for our data. Our infrastructure team can manage data placement based on policies to optimize workflows without application developers or researchers even knowing changes have occurred.”
