Roundabout optimizes NAS and SAN management with AJA Diskover Media Edition

The アジャ Diskover Media Edition data management software has given Los Angeles-based production company Roundabout Entertainment greater control over its network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN) and distributed file system, which together house 30 petabytes of media files.

As the AV industry has embraced workflows involving higher resolutions, such as those demanded by virtual production, post-production companies have been forced to invest in faster, higher-capacity storage systems. Sifting through petabytes of data to find a file quickly is one of those back-end processes that clients don’t always see but can be especially complex for content production and post-production facilities.

Roundabout has found a solution to this issue in the AJA Diskover Media Edition software. In the words of James Jan, vice president of technology for the production company: “With ElasticSearch working on the back end of AJA Diskover Media Edition, we can find files within minutes or seconds, even if they’re indexed, whereas before, a search might take hours. When one user needed a file but only knew part of the file contents, she started typing what she knew and saw results pop up nearly instantaneously. I was blown away.”

AJA Diskover Media Edition also allows clients to access Roundabout work while meeting strict security requirements, a process that was previously time consuming and required the engineering team to create web GUIs from scratch: “We can’t have clients on the production network, but they often need file access. With Diskover, we can do it quickly and with support for LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) authentication,” Jan explains, who also adds, “The customizable nature of Diskover also lets us write scripts so that our production and corporate scheduling teams can copy files, generate proxies, and convert audio files without jeopardizing the file’s integrity, which we couldn’t do before.”

Roundabout also takes advantage of the vast network of plug-ins available for AJA Diskover Media Edition, including the Media Info Harvest plug-in, which they use to scan all their files and store pertinent information such as resolution, color space and associated metadata. Jan and his team have also implemented AJA Diskover Media Edition’s integration with the Xytech media operations platform to streamline their workflow and eliminate the back and forth between Roundabout teams using the platform.