Isilon Systems White Paper Sample

Media and entertainment companies have experienced quantum leaps in the ability to turn out high‐quality assets extremely quickly, achieving both economies of scale and production advancements not dreamed of even a few years ago. However, although productions that once seemed impossible are now everyday occurrences, the advent of next‐generation digital production processes have not come without headaches and complications.

Digital media assets have quickly ballooned from hundreds of files consisting of just a few hundred megabytes to thousands of files at gigabytes in size, with single projects ranging into the terabytes. There are a variety of reasons for the explosive growth, from consumer demand, new devices and new delivery mediums (requiring media files to exist in multiple formats), to major advances in digital filming and VFX techniques. For the purposes of this paper, we need not examine all the various reasons for such growth. However, it is important to understand that, considering we are only at the cusp of the digital media era, more explosive, exponential growth is inevitable.

To accommodate growth, the traditional method has been to “simply add more space”. However, in this new era of digital media production, it’s not that “simple”: When managing large digital media files, traditional scale‐up storage technologies reach a point of diminishing return. Adding capacity will eventually overtax processor and throughput power, degrading overall system performance to unacceptable levels. And eventually, due to the fixed capacity ceiling of scale‐up storage, more space cannot be added to an existing file system, requiring a duplicate, disconnected island of storage. Each level of growth is compounded with another layer of complexity, requiring additional inconvenient steps and management overhead to what once seemed like a smooth, efficient process.