Thought Equity Management , Inc

Thought Equity Delivers Film and Video Content Four Times Faster with Sun StorageTek T10000 Tape Drive

Thought Equity Management, Inc. is the worldwide leader in motion imagery licensing and management for the entertainment, creative and corporate production industries. The company’s Web site gives creative professionals instant access to the world’s finest film and high definition content for their feature film, broadcast, cable, wireless, and other new media productions and programs. The company was founded in 2002 with headquarters in Denver, Colorado, and also has a digital refinery office in Laramie, Wyoming.

Customer Challenges

Provide customers with rapid online access to large film and video files
Scale petabyte-level storage environment in cost-effective increments to keep pace with customer requirements
Store more data with fewer drives to reduce data center footprint, power consumption and long-range storage hardware costs
Support demanding, high duty-cycle storage environment

Solution

Thought Equity added a high-capacity, high-throughput Sun StorageTek tape drive to its existing tape library to dramatically improve the storage density, speed and scalability of its digital archiving and on-demand content delivery system. Sun software provides centralized management of a storage area network that includes the Sun StorageTek tape drive and library, as well as other tape and disk systems.

Business Results

400% improvement in throughput of production-ready film and video clips delivered online
250% improvement in storage density with corresponding reduction in data center footprint
Avoided hundreds of thousands of dollars in chassis replacement costs by leveraging existing Sun StorageTek tape library
Established scalable, flexible infrastructure for cost-effective, incremental expansion

Products and Services

Story Details

A basketball player dribbles down the floor, preparing to take the last-second shot that will decide the NCAA championship. It’s all happening in a video clip that Thought Equity stores in digital form and makes available over the Internet for use in feature films, television programs, advertisements and corporate presentations. Customers such as the NCAA, HBO, National Geographic and Sony Pictures are driving rapid growth at this innovative company, whose digital archive expands at the rate of 5,000 new film and high-definition video clips each week.

The Thought Equity archive now contains petabytes of data, which must be stored and made readily available to customers online to preview and download. As data volumes grow, the Thought Equity IT team continually faces new challenges. In 2006, they upgraded their IT infrastructure by deploying a Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drive to store video clips and distribute them to customers over the Internet, allowing them to store data more efficiently and respond to customers more quickly.

" The Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drive enables us to deliver content four times faster while storing two-and-a-half times more data in the same footprint. It gives us the throughput and scalable capacity we need to support our expanding content archive and meet the growing demand for our services. "

— Mark Lemmons, Chief Technology Officer, Thought Equity Management, Inc.

Thought Equity evaluated solutions from other tape storage vendors, but Sun was the natural choice because of its longstanding relationship with the company.

Thought Equity leveraged its existing Sun storage solutions by installing the new Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drive in its Sun StorageTek L700 tape library, which uses both Sun StorageTek T10000 and T9940B tape drives to store production-ready master video clips. Compatibility of the T10000 drive with the Sun StorageTek L700 tape library allowed Thought Equity to rapidly add new storage capacity and avoid a six-figure forklift upgrade to a new library system.

The company had previously increased the rate at which it acquires new inventory by using Sun StorageTek L20 tape libraries with LTO Ultrium 2 tape drives to accept content from suppliers. Customers can also browse online through rough thumbnail versions, which are stored on a Sun StorageTek FlexLine FLX280 disk array. In addition, customers can download and edit lower-resolution “comps,” which are stored on a Sun StorageTek BladeStore B220 disk system.

These systems, including the T10000 drive, are connected on a storage area network managed from a single console with Sun StorageTek Storage Archive Manager software. Together, Sun software and hardware provide Thought Equity with an integrated solution to manage data over its entire lifecycle.

By delivering throughput four times faster than Thought Equity’s previous tape drives, the T10000 allows the company to better respond to customers even as data volumes and customer demands grow. The combination of the tape libraries and T10000 tape drive gives Thought Equity a flexible infrastructure that can be scaled in cost-effective increments as the business continues to grow.

The T10000 drive stores 250 percent more data in the same footprint, allowing the IT team to do more work with fewer drives and reduce maintenance, tape drive and media costs over the long range. The greater storage density of the T10000 drive also helps Thought Equity conserve data center floor space and minimize power consumption.

The T10000 drive is also ideally suited to Thought Equity’s high duty-cycle environment, in which the tape storage systems are constantly recovering video files and distributing them to customers. Additionally, its encryption features allow the company to meet customer needs for secure tape copies of proprietary content.

A SunSpectrum Service Plan gives Thought Equity prompt and expert technical support for its storage infrastructure. Undeterred by harsh weather, Sun personnel based in Denver often make several winter trips to Thought Equity’s Laramie, Wyoming office to discuss new solutions and technical issues. It’s part of a relationship based on trust and consistently more capable storage technology that supports data and business growth.