Pixit Media, known for storage solutions built specifically for media workflows, announced that Oscar-, Emmy-, and British Academy Film Award-winning creative studio Framestore has deployed Pixit Media’s PixStor software-defined scale-out storage solution at its Los Angeles, London, and New York sites as central production storage for the advertising part of its business. The deployment gives Framestore guaranteed performance and consistency across all three sites, a cost-effective and simplified approach to disaster recovery and business continuity, and a modular infrastructure that is easy to manage and expand to support multiple workflows.
“We’ve tried many flavors of NAS and SAN offerings, and we were really impressed with Pixit Media’s PixStor. It provides speed and quality of service while giving us the freedom to purchase our own hardware,” said Beren Lewis, Framestore’s global head of integrated advertising technology. “With PixStor, we get exactly the right balance of everything we need — guaranteed performance, the ability to control hardware costs, and the reassurance that we have a partner that really understands our workflow and applications — all in a model that we can easily reproduce globally.”
Renowned for its postproduction and visual effects work on blockbusters such as “Gravity,” “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” and movies in the Marvel franchise, Framestore is also behind the advertising campaigns for global brands such as Intel, Stella Artois, BMW, and Samsung. Seeking to push the boundaries of what is possible from available technology, Framestore chose PixStor not only to meet the exhausting demands of its current commercial-production workflow, but to grow and adapt with the business and its ambitious expansion plans.
In Framestore’s case, the PixStor solution combines Pixit Media’s media expertise and file-system tools with best-of-breed hardware components, such as NetApp E-Series storage arrays and network infrastructure from Mellanox Technologies for the back-end storage network. Each of Framestore’s sites uses multiple NetApp E-Series E5660 storage arrays with a mixture of 10K SAS drives and larger-capacity SATA drives, for a total of about 500 terabytes of usable storage per site.
Large broadcast production workgroups and boutique 4K facilities, which have zero tolerance for dropped frames, rely on NetApp E-Series. Operations can choose between RAID resiliency schemes, including Dynamic Disk Pools that dramatically reduce disk rebuild time, provide more consistent performance, and eliminate the need for hot or cold spares. Use of flash in hybrid arrays optimizes support for ancillary transcoding and rendering workflows. “Phone-home” features alert NetApp of potential disk failures before a hard disk fails, allowing the vendor or systems integrator to replace the drive without any impact on the production workgroup.
With the PixStor systems now online in three locations, Framestore is next planning to take advantage of the solution’s built-in intelligent sync tools to implement lightning-fast disk-to-disk copy for disaster recovery and business continuity.
“We’ve earned our customers’ trust through our consultative approach, proven technical competence, and added value,” said Ben Leaver, CEO, Pixit Media. “The fact that Framestore is one of those customers is significant because it is one of the largest and most prestigious companies in the industry. This deployment is a real endorsement of what we offer the market.”
Pixit Media will demonstrate the PixStor solution using the NetApp E-Series storage array at BVExpo on Stand J15 in Hall S1-8. Also, at the 2017 NAB Show, ATTO Technology will demonstrate the E-Series storage array in Booth SL9611.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More