360° cameras, drones, helicopters and even astronauts – 2017 NAB Show was incredible! If you missed it, or want a recap, we did an awesome Best of 2017 NAB Roundup with all our highlights. Now it’s time to get ready for this year’s show. So what’s hot at NAB 2018 and what you can expect from us in Las Vegas?
Hybrid Cloud Workflows – Hello Reverse Cloud!
Cloud. Cloud. Cloud. It seems everything has moved to the cloud. Yet suddenly we realize that maybe that’s not always the right solution.
The shock with public clouds often occurs when data needs to be removed. Everyone fell in love with a cost-of-entry perspective. But when you need to download big media files, or if it’s core content that needs to be accessed frequently, the costs (and the cost model) starts to whirl out of control.
We’re seeing a reverse public cloud trend, where companies are realizing that they need to pull content off the public cloud and back to on-premises.
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For most organizations, placing all data either on-premises or in a public cloud is probably not the right strategy. Hybrid cloud models enable a best of both worlds solution – the savings of fixed assets (particular the cost-efficiency and petascale capabilities of object storage), the ability to burst for compute and storage, and the potential to leverage multiple cloud providers’ services, tools and collaborative capabilities.
So how do you do that? I recently sat with James Staten of Equinix to talk about Interconnection Oriented Architecture and best practices for building a digital edge strategy:
AI and Analytics – Talk Less Do More
AI will continue to be hot at NAB 2018. It certainly was present at every corner of the show last year. We’re starting to see far better understanding not only of where AI is headed for media and entertainment, but how it can already be used today.
AI and analytics are there to help understand audiences so companies can deliver dynamic, personalized content. Apache Hadoop® is one of the key software tools for measuring TV viewing and other digital media user behavior, but it’s expensive to scale. Luckily, a recent exciting development is about to change that.
The new S3A feature in Hadoop® allows you to connect an S3-compatible object store in Hadoop as a second tier of cold storage. Why is this a big deal? Because the disk use of Hadoop’s HDFS triple replicates already massive datasets. You won’t be able to keep up with the growth of data when you’re replicating petabytes and petabytes of content. On the other hand, object storage can scale very easily at very low costs. It uses erasure coding to deliver a far more efficient data protection than replication so you can keep all that valuable data for analytics to make smarter, impactful decisions.
I’ll let Mike McWhorter, Senior Technologist, DCS Field Applications Engineering walk you through the use case:
The Death of Tape (It’s Real this Time)
If you worked with tape, or have a tape library, I don’t need to explain this to you. There’s not a whole lot of good things to say about tape. Most people are just fed up with it. It’s hard to find the specific content you’re looking for, it’s often poorly documented, and it’s sloooooooooow.
Media companies are moving off of tape because they need warm access to data. They want to make old content available to their creative teams for creating new content and they want to monetize existing assets. You can’t do that with tape.
Here’s a great story about how Sundance transformed their archive:
Western Digital at Every Stage of the Workflow at NAB 2018
CAPTURE > CREATE > POST-PRODUCE > DELIVER > ARCHIVE!
We’ll be at NAB 2018 showcasing our award-winning G-Technology®, HGST, Tegile™ and SanDisk®-branded solutions and how we’re enabling independent filmmakers, studios, production houses, and broadcast and distribution companies to better capture, edit, share, transform and archive content.
Come talk to us about how your data is evolving and we’ll show you how we’re there at every stage improving productivity, facilitating data forever and lowering total cost of ownership for 2K, 4K, 6K, HFR and UHD workflows.
See you in Booth #SL6316!
