Active Media Demands an Agile Infrastructure

One thing is crystal clear, Media companies are creating an incredible amount of content, and they’re creating more and more of that content. This data is accumulated in huge libraries and retained for long periods. Access to this data is required on a regular basis, but the old way of long term media storage — meaning tapes or other analog archival storage —  just can’t handle the intensely and the scale that today’s content production requires. More than that, current storage solutions tend to bundle hardware and software together, creating a vendor lock – an increasingly unacceptable situation for most media and entertainment companies.

The challenge is to manage this vast amount of unstructured data in ways that can easily scale and be readily and quickly accessible, online and across the entire media supply chain. Active media needs agile infrastructure.

Agile infrastructure is ascending in industrial importance just to better deal with all that content. And by “deal with” I mean accessing it, manipulating it, and finding discrete parts within it, which requires different types of programmability and management than traditional content storage systems.

Equally important is the ability to scale storage in a way that obviates “vendor-lock.”

One answer is software-defined storage. Such object-based storage provides capacity, and it’s what Cisco brings to the table; the end-to-end workflows are what our partners bring. Together, the solution combines unstructured data into a single pool, where it’s easy to find, easy to store, easy to access and easy to protect. As a direct result, media and entertainment creators are able to:

• Scale the storage environment by simply adding additional servers;
• Be geo-distributed, meaning that the systems can go anywhere;
• Treat the cloud like it’s an extension of the existing storage environment; and
• Easily integrate with other media workflows.

Plus, with software-defined storage, you can use ANY storage capacity with your end-to-end workflow software solution, or use ANY end-to-end workflow software with the storage capacity you have – software-defined storage vaporizes vendor lock!

It’s a limitless, scalable and flexible storage system that gives media and entertainment companies the freedom to grow, on their own terms, both with hardware (capacity) and software (control).

It’s another piece of the acceleration puzzle: Content that’s available whenever it’s needed, wherever it’s needed, and ready for different use cases.

Cisco’s UCS storage series provides the capacity content creators need, with more cost-efficient ways to store and access it. Widely adopted, and a part of the Cisco system for UCS, it’s really just another resource inside that pool – which means that the same smart manageability and maintenance benefits apply. And it’s integrated with all the major ecosystem workflow partners in the industry – which means more choice and control. In short, Cisco has the software-defined storage solution you need, tested and validated.

Learn more about Cisco’s data center solutions here.

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