Elektrofilm Digital Studios

Creating Ground Breaking Digital Media Environment with Sun

At the forefront of Hollywood’s digital revolution, Elektrofilm Digital Studios is an industry leader in technology-enabled media services for the entertainment industry. Its services include editorial, effects, audio, duplication, encoding, restoration, DVD authoring and digital asset management. This provider is leading the charge to create data-centric workflows for media industry needs with the eMedia Systems Digital Media Environment (DME). eMedia Systems and Elektrofilm, both being subsidiaries of Medici Media are working together to develop a revolutionary, highly-scalable platform designed to suit the needs of media providers across the entertainment industry.

Customer Challenges

Create an open standards-based environment for ingesting, archiving and managing digital media
Base system on high-performance, scalable infrastructure to manage the extremely large file sizes of digital media
Improve internal operations and lower TCO
Gain competitive advantage

Solution

Elektrofilm Digital Studios and eMedia selected Sun to help build a high-speed open standards-based IT environment for ingesting, archiving and managing digital content.

Business Results

Lowered total cost of ownership with tiered storage and content lifecycle management
Streamlined workflow and achieved competitive advantage
Managing 750 terabytes of data, with expected growth to 1.5 petabyte in the coming year

Products and Services

Story Details

What kind of platform do you need when your business involves massive digital media files and you want to advance market leadership through innovation? This was the challenge facing Elektrofilm Digital Studios, a Burbank, California media services company for the entertainment industry that is also part of the larger Elektrofilm USA GmbH organization. Its business objectives were to streamline internal operations and improve efficiency, thus gaining a competitive advantage.

The team chose to implement a tapeless workflow that did not rely on inefficient analog video tape. The vision was for a high-performance platform with unparalleled capabilities for ingesting, archiving and managing these digital media assets. In addition to a solution that could scale easily to meet growing needs, the company wanted a single-vendor solution to help ensure performance and simplify support.

" Digital media management of this scale has until recently been prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the complexity of the enabling software and infrastructure has acted as a barrier to the successful commercial implementation of our vision – until now. With the help of Sun Microsystems and their comprehensive platform components, including servers, storage, software, and professional services, we’ve been able to focus our development efforts into realizing the Digital Media Environment (DME). "

— Chip Aycock, COO, eMedia Systems

This is a big challenge, and so the company worked with Sun to architect and deliver this solution. As a result of a thoughtful and collaborative process between these companies, the ground-breaking Elektrofilm Digital Media Environment (DME) was conceived. It leverages a range of Sun technology to deliver a high-speed, open standards-based database with lossless storage capabilities, Web-based management and delivery tools in a highly secure environment.

The digital asset management portion of the solution is based on Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager and Sun StorageTek QFS software running on a Sun Fire X4600 Server with Solaris 10 Operating System. Integration across these Sun storage management products provides two key benefits to Elektrofilm: the ability to seamlessly move digital files across a cost-effective tiered storage environment and the ability for users to transparently access digital files regardless of where they are stored.

The multi-tiered storage solution includes a Sun StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System with Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drives connected to Sun StorageTek 6140 and Sun StorageTek 6540 disk arrays via the Brocade 48000 Director and Brocade 4100 Enterprise Fabric switch. This hardware solution was chosen for the digital repository because of its scalability, reliability and performance. Storing and retrieving digital video is a common and repetitive media and entertainment task, and the high throughput and storage capacity of the T10000 tape drives add a key advantage to the solution. Sun Fire X4500 servers are being used as NFS gateways for the storage subsystem. A range of Sun Fire x64, CoolThread and UltraSPARC servers—Sun Fire X4100, X4200, X4600, T1000, V215, V245, V445 and V490 servers—were also included in the design to support the development and production environments.

The Digital Media Environment is being developed by eMedia Systems, which shares a parent company with Elektrofilm Digital Studios. The DME is in production in the Elektrofilm Burbank facility, and currently contains about 750 terabytes of storage. But Elektrofilm has an expansive vision for it—expecting to grow the platform over the next year to contain about 1.5 petabyte of digital media files as they help bring the best of digital media services technology to the entertainment industry.