SwiftStack is natively integrated into leading MAM systems—providing petabyte-scale storage to keep all your assets active and simplifying your environment by reducing the number of tiers in which your data lives.

Content ingested into SwiftStack is instantly available to any user—even to remote users thousands of miles away. Keeping all assets active in SwiftStack means users no longer have to wait for retrievals from LTO tapes or replication jobs to complete from other storage systems.

As an example, learn about the benefits of SwiftStack’s integration with Vizrt Viz One.

SwiftStack can be deployed in a single site or used to connect multiple sites together with a single view of the assets stored. Instead of using FTP or a WAN accelerator to send large files from point A to point B, with SwiftStack, any data uploaded at any site can be instantly accessed at any remote site. With SwiftStack, you can write anywhere and read everywhere!

SwiftStack storage is comprised of standard server hardware and is a cost-effective alternative to your LTO tape system. With SwiftStack, you can keep all your assets active—even in your archive—and eliminate the need for risky and time-consuming tape migrations.

If you require your assets to live on multiple media types in multiple locations, you can connect your on-premises archive together with public cloud storage. SwiftStack’s Cloud Sync can automatically replicate some or all of your assets to Amazon or Google Cloud.

The SwiftStack architecture makes it simple to scale network bandwidth in and out of the cluster. This allows it to provide massive throughput for uploading and downloading content, which means that it takes less time to store and retrieve big files. This is accomplished by moving lots of data in parallel—even saturating multiple 10Gb network links.

There are many ways to get data in and out of SwiftStack. Applications like asset managers and file transfer tools often use HTTP object storage APIs like S3 and Swift. End users can use the SwiftStack Client to browse assets in SwiftStack and upload or download them directly. Currently in beta, SwiftStack also has SMB and NFS file protocols built into the core of the system to support traditional applications and workflows.

SwiftStack allows for “ranged reads,” which means that several parts of a media file can be accessed in parallel. So, if you use a transcoder that can run in containers like Docker or Kubernetes, many instances of that transcoder can work on the same asset at the same time, which can result in dramatic time savings for large transcoding or rendering jobs.

Also, since SwiftStack storage can be extended into the public cloud using Cloud Sync, extra compute resources in AWS or Google Cloud can be utilized during a transcoding or rendering job. Defined by a policy, data can be automatically replicated to the public cloud, and results can be synced back on-premises when the jobs have completed.

While most editing workflows utilize ultra-fast storage close to the editor (like the flash drive in your workstation), we’re also seeing editing workflows begin to leverage cloud storage technologies as well.

As one example, Vizrt’s Viz One MAM is tightly integrated with SwiftStack, and one feature they implemented is scrub editing of proxies directly in SwiftStack; with Viz One, you don’t have to check out and check in media to work on proxies any longer.

Another example is Wiredrive, which essentially offers MAM-as-a-service. As editing occurs on dailies or other media, the asset is stored in SwiftStack and is accessible on mobile devices by directors or other remote staff who can comment or mark up the draft and provide near-real-time feedback to the craft editors.

If your final assets are stored in SwiftStack, then your active archive can also be your playout staging location for a solution like Snell. All assets are available to be moved to high-speed playout storage when needed.

For online publishing, platforms like Vimeo and YouTube often assume that the assets are uploaded from a local computer. With SwiftStack Drive, all assets stored in SwiftStack can be accessed like they’re on a locally connected drive.

If you don’t own the final content, or if your workflow concludes with the transfer of assets to someone else, then using a tool like Aspera or Signiant might be the last step for you. They support sending and receiving data directly to and from S3-compatible storage, so you can use them to transfer data from SwiftStack to wherever it needs to go. Or, you can provide external access to SwiftStack by sending a “temporary URL” to access a single file for a limited period of time.