From large production studios to two-person boutiques, the mantra is the same: More bandwidth and more capacity. The storage requirements for media /entertainment facilities are unique: blazing bandwidth, capacious capacity, and a need for collaborative content sharing, as illustrated in the following case studies:

SANTA FE PRODUCTIONS

When Santa Fe Productions, a post-production company in Brooklyn, NY, hit the storage capacity/bandwidth wall, the studio investigated a Fibre Channel SAN and 10GbE-based storage solutions. But those options proved to be twice as expensive as the storage configuration that Santa Fe wound up implementing, which includes Atto Technology's FastStream SC 7500 controller and 4Gbps Celerity HBAs, as well as UltraStor RS16 JS SAS/SATA disk arrays from Enhance Technology.

Before upgrading its storage environment, Santa Fe Productions had two Mac workstations and was swapping HD files between direct-attached eSATA/FireWire disk arrays. That setup proved time-consuming and interrupted the production studio's workflow, according to director and editor Eli Brown. And when the firm added a third Mac, data rates dropped precipitously.

"We had to duplicate all of our digitized footage and other graphic assets across multiple FireWire drives and share them as we needed them," Brown explains. "If someone needed a clip and they didn't have it, we'd have to copy it from wherever it was and move the drives around."

Santa Fe Productions' current storage configuration is anchored by Atto's FastStream SC 7500 controller, which sits between the three Mac workstations (a G5 and two Mac Pros running a variety of video applications, as well as Tiger Technology's MetaSAN 3.0 SAN management software) and 16-bay UltraStor RS16JS SAS/SATA JBOD arrays from Enhance. The total usable capacity is 13.7TB, with 1TB SATA drives in a RAID-5 configuration.

The new storage environment allows the studio to run multiple compressed HD video streams simultaneously without any bottlenecks. "The key benefit of the SC7500 was in workflow productivity," says Brown. "We have more than enough performance, and we can share files without losing time copying them." (Atto claims that the SC7500 can support up to five streams of 10-bit

The storage configuration behind the creation of images for The Brain Fitness Program included 4Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs and a FastStream SC7500 RAID controller from Atto, and SAS/SATA JBOD disk arrays from Enhance Technology

uncompressed HD video, with performance of up to 1,200MBps in an all-SAS configuration). And the controller provides the ability to connect up to four workstations and to add up to eight 16-bay arrays for more capacity.

Essentially, Atto's SC7500 provides the shared-storage environment and features of a SAN, but without the expense associated with a traditional switch-based Fibre Channel SAN, according to Brown. Other features of the SC7500 include built-in RAID functionality and four external Fibre Channel ports Santa Fe Productions creates non-fiction programming for broadcast television and home video and film distribution. One of its latest projects was The Brain Fitness Program, which aired on PBS stations.