Scenario
A multinational Consumer Products company had a 8 year old video editing storage system consisting of 2 Apple Xsan Volumes with a total of 55 TB of storage. These storage volumes were used on 3 video editing Workstations and connected via fibre channel cables.
Because of turnover in the company and department, knowledge of the Xsan storage system’s operation was limited and the IT department had never provided support for the system. To further complicate things, he external contractor that had provided support for the system had ceased operations.
After being called in to examine the situation, it was determined that much of the files are the Xsan were not backed up and there was no remote backups at all. Much of the data was digitized video of the company founders from the 1930s and 40s of historical significance to the company, The original films were no longer available. This made it essential to determine a reliable replacement system quickly.
Analysis
The storage was mounted as 2 local volumes of 25 TB and 30 TB on each of the Video Editing Workstations.
It was essential to determine a new system to replace the system that conformed with current security requirements and handled the demands of the video editor in maintaining their workflows.
The MC Services Team determined that it was essential to move to a modern technology solution while maintaining ease of use for the client. It was also determined that the client would like to make a part of the storage solution available to select people for review of the uncompressed videos over the network.
The Solution
It was determined that the best course of action to fulfill both the video editors and the new security requirements was to install an modern server capable of serving as an iSCSI shared volume for the video editors as well an SMB Shared volume for video reviewers.
A Synology server with 12 Hard drive bays and SSD acceleration was chosen as the storage device. It was bound to the companies Active Directory authentication system in order to meet the security requirements and full disk encryption was enabled. Remote backup was set up to another of the companies data centers to a duplicate Synology server. For Local Backup Snapshots of the storage array were enabled.
A 30 TB SMB Shared volume was created along with a 60TB iSCSI volume. The server also allows for further storage expansion if necessary in the future.
The Results
The final solution met all security requirements and also gave the video editors a faster storage solution along with eliminating copying the uncompressed videos to external hard drives for review by other company personnel.
It also assured that data would be secure even with hardware failure.
