HITS
Sundance Institute Looks to Western Digital
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With the 2018 Sundance Film Festival winding down, data storage firm Western Digital is celebrating a major success.
That’s because the Sundance Institute has begun using Western Digital’s ActiveScale object storage for all its assets, leveraging ActiveScale’s scalability of up to 52 petabytes, and easy, on-prem access to what it owns.
“The relationship with Western Digital has given Sundance Institute a solution to our preservation problem, while giving us a petabyte scale solution for the future,” said Justin Simmons, director of technology services for Sundance Institute. “ActiveScale also has a plan where we can continue to incrementally add large blocks of storage. So it’s not just a five-year plan; we’re talking 10-15 year plan, and that’s a tremendous peace of mind for us.”
Simmons said preserving its history has become crucial for the legacy of the Sundance Institute and the independent storytellers the Institute supports. And trying to access all of its assets via old tape files just wasn’t getting it done.
“With cloud storage it’s absolutely great for a lot of situations, but when you start talking assets that you need to get out frequently and where you need to scale really big and keep them for a long time, cloud becomes very expensive, and the retrieval times can be quite slow,” he said. “So an on-premise solution like ActiveScale was really the right choice for us.
“Western Digital has something no one else does: a system built for preservation that grows to petabyte scale and helps keep assets forever at an affordable cost. Centralizing our archives so they are secure, protected, searchable, and accessible to the entire organization solves our preservation problem and gives us a scalable solution for the future.”
Tanya De Angelis, associate director of archives and collections for Sundance Institute, said the initial goal is to move all digital content over to ActiveScale. “Then continuing to digitize when budget allows, all of our analog video, which would then be organized into that same folder structure and ingested on to ActiveScale,” she said.
Erik Weaver, global director of M&E market development for HGST, a Western Digital brand, put it simply: “it’s wonderful to support such a wonderful organization.”
