Distributed storage firm Storj has targeted media firms with a compute and data platform targeted at their particular needs.
The Production Cloud service will initially combine the firm’s new Global Collaboration tier of high-performance distributed object storage and Object Mount cloud media access into a single offering. It will be free from egress and API fees.
A “cloud compute for media” service is in beta, it added, and will be launched “soon.” Storj acquired Valdi’s high performance compute platform last year.
The firm said the new service is designed for editorial, media production teams in post, news, and sports, enabling them to “collaborate globally, move faster and scale with confidence.”
Las year the firm released research showing that three quarters of IT decision makers in media and entertainment organizations believed film production was heading to the cloud, with over three quarters saying global availability was important or very important.
This week Storj cited changes in the media world over recent years, with “more remote collaboration, massive file sizes, global delivery timelines, unpredictable cloud bills, and non-stop deadlines.”
“Transferring hundreds of gigabytes across regions leads to delays,” the firm noted, “while surprise egress fees strain budgets, and replication-heavy architectures slow down productions.”
Change of location
None of that is necessarily unique to the media world, but those massive files are overwhelmingly going to be unstructured data. Moreover, while financial institutions or pharma orgs also have distributed operations and massive amounts of data, they don’t have the added complication of “creatives” and even “artists” in the mix.
David Colantuoni, Vice President of Product Management at Storj, said that different media organizations had different requirements. News orgs work with petabytes of storage and need fast turnaround and burst capacity. Film and TB production spans TBs to PBs of archive plus long term retention and retrieval. Sports orgs have massive injest requirements. But all need low latency access from anywhere and predictable costs.
The service runs on the firm’s own distributed storage network. And Colantuoni said, “Our Object Mount product presents object storage as a local drive, enabling frame-accurate editing and proxy workflows directly from the cloud.” Other services relied on “heavy replication” across regions he said. “This can introduce latency or unpredictable egress costs.”
