Integrated Media Technologies, based in Los Angeles, has solved critical storage management problems with StorageOS with the benefit of outstanding support.
The customer
As a leader in media and IT technology and workflow solutions, Los Angeles-based Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) combines experience and expertise with its world-class engineering, sales and consultancy teams.
Challenge
With the global shift to cloud infrastructure, IMT has been building a greater focus on services and software, including Media Asset Management and software development specialties.
IMT identified a gap in the media and entertainment market by replacing traditional tape archives with cloud and cold storage solutions. Traditionally, a storage vendor would sell each storage tier to customers in this market alongside software to manage each dataset.
Despite the rapid development of cloud-based storage solutions, there were no archive storage management technologies available that allowed organizations to move data between different tiers based on rules and policies while tracking associated costs.
It was this growing requirement in the media and entertainment marketplace that led to IMT’s development of the SoDA software solution. SoDA is a state-of-the-art enterprise software application designed to seamlessly manage and automate file movement in and out of the cloud and deliver actionable insight into the OPEX costs of storage and cloud services.
Its development is the culmination of IMT’s 13 years of experience designing, engineering and building modern storage management systems for over 700 customers, including many Fortune 500 companies. By addressing the complexities of on-prem and multi-cloud storage environments, SoDA solves critical storage management problems making technical organizations accountable and efficient.
Deployed in the customer data center, SoDA is a managed software and required infrastructure that is highly available. The IMT team decided that running a Kubernetes cluster at the Edge as a software target would deliver an effective and resilient infrastructure solution. There remained, however, the issue of persistent data which couldn’t be written locally owing to the risk of data loss in the event of node failure.
Solution
To address this challenge, IMT studied the market to see whether there was a suitable storage solution available that would meet their needs, particularly around price, performance, database persistence, support and high availability – a search that led them to StorageOS.
Part of IMT’s solution evaluation process involved researching potential storage technology vendors, StorageOS included other established technologies.
“I knew there were open-source solutions out there, such as Longhorn and Rook that perhaps had the potential to meet our needs,” said JD Trout, VP, Software Solutions at IMT.
“My concerns about some of these solutions were focused around performance and access to support, because we needed the storage element of the solution to be as fault tolerant as possible.”
Therefore, following a thorough evaluation process, StorageOS was chosen as the platform to deliver the data persistence layer in SoDA.
“Compared to some of the other solutions we considered, StorageOS stood out because the processes required to deploy it was less complex, as well as being much easier to maintain,” said Trout.
Specifically, StorageOS provides IMT with a cloud-native, software-defined storage solution that delivers persistent storage for Kubernetes. Built from the ground-up with no legacy restrictions, it offered their team control of storage with no compromise on performance, availability or security. Fast, scalable, software-based block storage, StorageOS delivers rapid failover, replication, in-memory cache and data reduction with access controls.
Benefits
The initial production deployment of SoDA made use of IMT’s existing customer base with the integration of Media Asset Management solutions for targeted clients. This resulted in a customer content management role with brokered data movements to SoDA.
“This allows us to provide customers with a cost breakdown of cloud cost by user based on who is using the application, instead of the application itself making a request to the cloud provider such as AWS, where they incur cost as a result,” said Trout.
On a broader level, IMT and its customers have benefited from cost, time and resource savings over solutions that were used previously.
“For us, StorageOS delivers the perfect combination between performance and price,” said Trout. “Alternative open-source solutions would have required us to allocate expensive technical resources to learn about the platform. That person then becomes the sole bottleneck of information, which is less than ideal and didn’t meet our requirements.
“StorageOS, however, has the support infrastructure in place where if there is a problem, I can draw on the deep product knowledge of their experts to put things right.”
In addition, IMT points towards the StorageOS pricing model, offering the ability to scale cost effectively in a ‘pay as you grow’ structure.
“Overall, StorageOS are a joy to work with,” said Trout. “We have a storage solution we are confident in, and one of the most important points of all is that the company we are partnering with just ‘gets’ storage.”
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