UPDATED 16:30 EDT / APRIL 24 2017

CLOUD

Cloud is tops for agility but must ‘spin down’ large-scale storage cost, says Sundance Institute

Agility? Check. Efficiency? Check. Cheap Storage? Eh. The cloud may have a lot going for it, but its storage cost might need to come down for some companies with permanently expanding data, such as the Sundance Institute.

Sundance has 35 years worth of films, festival footage and other data to save that grows each year, according to Justin Simmons (pictured), director of technology services at Sundance Institute.

“We have about 30 lab or educational events that happen year round all over the world, and those are also generating more media, more files that need to be stored and saved and tracked,” he told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at today’s NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. (*Disclosure below.) 

In 2011, the independent film organization went aggressively toward cloud technologies but encountered some roadblocks. “We ran into the limitations really quickly — the speed and the cost when you start going at scale started to impact us,” Simmons said. As a result, Sundance decided to pull back from cloud for storage and preserve its files with HGST object storage, which allows the Institute to better preserve assets by letting it split a file into multiple parts.

However, cloud does have a valuable place in the Sundance Institute’s business where agility is the top priority. It uses Reach Engine by Levels Beyond, an enterprise-level video platform for streamlined media management, analytics and security.

Also, on the creative side, cloud is enabling collaboration among Sundance content producers. “We want to use the cloud to capture that content, and we also want to use the cloud to help collaborate with whatever editor or sound mixer that we’re working with,” Simmons stated.

Cloud’s coming attractions

Independent filmmakers on tight budgets may find cheap, temporary cloud infrastructure makes the difference between an idea and a finished film, Simmons explained.

“They’re going to be around for a year or two; they need a solution to [get up], they need to collaborate and it all needs to happen very quickly and for a reasonable cost,” he said.

In coming years, the cloud will likely offer better tools to achieve this, Simmons predicted.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the NAB Show. (*Disclosure: Western Digital is sponsoring theCUBE’s coverage at the show. Neither Western Digital nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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