Major studios and networks around the world turn to Qumulo for industry leadership to successfully capture, collaborate and distribute file data

Qumulo, the breakthrough leader in radically simplifying enterprise file data management across hybrid-cloud environments, has seen a significant increase in both the file data needs of media and entertainment (M&E) customers and in customer adoption. As global enterprises dramatically accelerate their digital transformation, the company today revealed it is managing more than an exabyte of data and more than 235 billion files for customers around the world. Qumulo customers create over 1 billion files and perform over 200 billion operations each day, 90% of which take less than one millisecond to execute. With 7 of the top 10 media and entertainment companies leveraging Qumulo, the company saw impressive growth in customer adoption as the industry rapidly adopts cloud and virtual collaboration. Cutting edge studios including Industrial Brothers, Cinesite, Jam Filled Entertainment and FuseFX use Qumulo to produce television shows, animated feature films and world-renowned VFX projects, such as the James Bond franchise, the Avengers and “American Horror Story.”

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“The post-production schedule provides a very short timeline to create quality effects”

Media and entertainment companies are grappling with the skyrocketing demand for producing high-quality digital content. According to a recent report by Research and Markets¹, over 116 exabytes of new digital storage will be used for digital archiving and content conversion and preservation by 2025. Advancements in computer imaging for visual effects and animation as well as the increasing popularity of 4K UHD content are driving the inevitable need for massive data storage. The report also states that producers are experimenting with innovative methods for cinematography that require rendering terabytes of raw footage, making it essential to have the ability to scale up as needed over the course of a production period.

The past year produced a new set of challenges for media and entertainment enterprises. Creative teams around the world had to quickly pivot their business strategies by shifting production processes from on-premises to remote platforms, ensuring animation and creativity were not impacted by infrastructure limitations, all while increasing collaboration and productivity to ensure business deadlines weren’t missed.

“Since moving our storage infrastructure over to Qumulo, we no longer need to have someone dedicated to storage. It becomes a shared role that a few people in our team can help with,” Jason Burnard, IT Director, Guru Studio. “As our studio grows, we love that we do not need to re-think our storage solution, it’s simple enough to pop another node in the cluster. To expand the cluster, we just scale it up!”

Studios are turning to Qumulo for support throughout the full data lifecycle of creative work streams, storing petabytes of raw footage and animation sequences while managing virtual collaboration in the cloud. Even as special effects, animation, and HD capabilities continue to rapidly advance, Qumulo provides reliable, high-performance data access to streamline creativity and collaboration. Robust management, storage, and protection for petabyte levels of HD, 4K, and 8K content across cloud environments provide support and visibility for billions of files. By enabling this radical simplicity, customers can easily scale to advance editorial and video production workflows and keep creative productivity on track and meet media production deadlines.

“The post-production schedule provides a very short timeline to create quality effects,” said Farnia Fekri, Director of Marketing, MARZ. “We chose Qumulo because its software allows us to deliver higher quality visual effects on a shorter timeline, and ensures that we fulfill our promise to our customers.”

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The Qumulo File Data Platform, meets the needs of today’s in-house and remote creative teams by providing dynamic scalability, increased efficiency and cost savings:

• Animation studio Industrial Brothers went from downtime of almost 2,000 annual labor hours, to zero downtime by switching to Qumulo File Data Platform — saving approximately $80,000 a year.
• Jam Filled Entertainment, a Canadian animation studio known for its work with Nickelodeon, realized its IT service was receiving more than 780 uptime and performance-related support tickets a year with its prior system. By moving to Qumulo, Jam Filled reduced that number to zero. Jam Filled Entertainment animation studio immediately improved user productivity, safeguarded customer deadlines, and minimized stress as a result of Qumulo’s strong reliability and high performance platform.
• VFX studio FuseFX, which creates visual effects for popular productions like “American Horror Story” and “The Flight Attendant,” leveraged Qumulo Cloud Q to render 32,000 core frames across 1,000 machines in under an hour. FuseFX now uses Qumulo as a long-term solution for fast, clustered storage management.

“Qumulo is leading a data revolution in the media and entertainment industry. We are helping the world’s leading creative teams including animators, visual effects creators and post production teams, evolve and transform their businesses to deliver the highest quality projects,” said Ben Gitenstein, Vice President of Product at Qumulo. “By providing a modern infrastructure that can scale to meet the most demanding performance requirements, our customers can focus on accelerating innovation and increasing collaboration, knowing that the leader in this market is helping them manage, store and protect exabytes of file data, whether they have on-prem or cloud environments.”

Qumulo Enables Media and Entertainment Customers to:

• Integrate seamlessly with existing applications leveraging the Qumulo® File Data Platform. Qumulo’s file system creates a single pool of storage which supports SMB and NFS file protocols.
• Dynamically scale with Qumulo Scale, to serve petabytes of content on-prem and cloud to support collaboration, post production, file sharing, burst rendering, and/or storage/archive.
• Utilize Qumulo’s all-NVMe or hybrid flash-first platforms, which enable flash-first writes and predictive caching to ensure the data needed is always rapidly available. Low latency and ultra-fast performance accelerate collaboration, creativity, management, and delivery.
• Optimize creative environments through simplified resource management and cost reduction with real-time analytics.
• Leverage multi-protocol support and permission management for mixed SMB/NFS environments where the workflows utilize asset management platforms and non-linear editing systems on the same shared data.
• Advance editorial and video production workflows with high-performance remote collaboration, enabling both production and editorial teams to maintain high performance across multiple remote locations.
• Leverage cloud-native software to allow creative teams the ability to work anywhere in the world, providing multiple editors and artists the opportunity to read-write and transform data across protocols, locations, and applications with unmatched scalability, speed and reliability.
• Distribute file data globally with ease. Editors and animators can ingest raw content and footage directly from many types of applications directly to Qumulo and publish the data for people to easily use across multiple regions and various machines including Linux, Mac, and Windows.