Johannesburg, 08 Nov 2017
MediaCloud, a niche market Internet, telecommunications and cloud services provider, has opted to go the hyperconverged route with Datacentrix, a provider of high performing and secure ICT solutions, allowing the company to meet the demanding needs of the film, television and media industries.
According to Cecil Barry, founder and MD of MediaCloud, today's fast-paced production environment has brought with it the ever-increasing need for secure, reliable and high-speed connectivity solutions to allow media-rich content creators and distributors alike to send, receive and distribute content without any delays.
Over the past decade, he explains, the industry has migrated from tape-based analogue systems to a digital environment, shooting on solid-state media, which is then ingested within disk-based systems that are typically stored on site or in data centres.
"Bottlenecks within this process can become both expensive and time-consuming, and in many cases, standard Internet connections just aren't quick or robust enough to send large files in a timely manner.
"As a company that services hundreds of clients at the same time, who all want access to terabytes if not petabytes of storage, MediaCloud moves, processes and stores large volumes of data at a time on a daily basis. We have a love/hate relationship with technology; it's costly, so the notion of virtualising all this technology and not having to house physical hardware could be perceived as one that is almost 'romantic' to us," notes Barry.
MediaCloud wanted to virtualise certain elements of its hosted environment, enabling it, for example, to spin up a virtual machine (VM) for a specific client within a very short space of time, without any bandwidth contention ratios, connectivity or latency challenges.
"We need to be able to deliver content backwards and forwards between the production company and broadcaster, as well as to open up huge files, move media around, process it, render it, mix audio files, perform colour grading and so on, on a file that is essentially kilometres away. Fundamentally, this requires a lot of bandwidth," continues Barry.
"And, obviously, no one wants their media to be vulnerable to theft or piracy, so the challenge for us was to be able to create silos that are secure, protected and possibly encrypted. When it comes to looking after a client's assets, it was really important that we would be able to provide a level of security that ensures their assets are within a safe environment. Redundancy and reliability were also critical."
Faced with these challenges, MediaCloud has built a high-speed managed fibre-optic network, specifically designed to meet the rigours of today's current and future, new media, print, high-definition and digital cinema workflows.
"Our investment in this cloud-based infrastructure means MediaCloud is now able to provision services rapidly and scale our internal infrastructure into bite-sized chunks. This means we do not over-capitalise on the initial purchase of IT infrastructure, while also unlocking this new market segment."
The organisation's vision to deliver cloud services is linked to the following product offerings:
* Media asset management workflows and automation;
* Object-based storage;
* Post-production project management and sharing;
* Broadcast and media solutions; and
* Data management.
This is based on solutions including accelerated file transfers, backup and archiving solutions, cloud PBX, live broadcast links, unified communication servers, scalable object storage, and live Web streaming.
"By implementing a resilient, easy-to-manage infrastructure, MediaCloud is able to realise its vision of delivering these services without the complexity of managing a legacy architecture. This hyperconverged infrastructure has not only simplified operations, it also allows the company to focus on delivering innovative and cost-effective solutions to customers without the need to over-invest in expensive IT resources," states Graeme Dendy, business unit manager at Datacentrix. "Furthermore, the simplification of IT deployment has freed up resources to focus on core business and delivering better services.
"By embracing new technological trends, MediaCloud bolsters its reputation as a leader in this market segment, and ensures that it will continue to be seen as the most relevant player within what is a highly complex market segment," he says.
Barry adds the solution implemented by Datacentrix has "ticked all of MediaCloud's boxes in terms of availability, scalability, performance and reliability, as well as other areas such as the ability for non-disruptive upgrades.
"From a price perspective too, while the solution is equivalent to a traditional system when looking at cost per virtual machine (VM) or node, there are a host of added advantages that come with this type of infrastructure. The fact that we don't need to go and buy a switch, storage and a compute station - it all ships as one highly reliable unit - is of huge value to MediaCloud.
"MediaCloud is staying ahead of the technology curve, and the fact that we managed to pre-sell all of the availability on the new system before it was even installed is a clear indicator of the need for hyper-convergence within the media industry," he concludes.
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