Create Makes the Bold Decision to Replace High-End Media Storage With Storage Spaces Direct

The high cost of slow computers

For years, graphics and media professionals have had a near-religious devotion to Apple products. But that’s changing as graphics and media software applications migrate to the Windows operating system and agencies tire of paying a premium for products that often are no longer top of class.

Create Advertising Group, a post-production house based in Los Angeles with an office in London, is one agency that has converted to Windows, not only for workstations but for back-end storage. Create is primarily a “trailer house,” producing two-to-three-minute theatrical trailers for movies, TV shows, and video games. It created the trailers for Hollywood blockbusters such as James Bond: Spectre, Finding Dory, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Iron Man 3, Minions, and many others. The company is also expanding its virtual reality (VR) services as that technology takes off.

Like many media and entertainment companies, Create used Apple Mac workstations for its creative professionals, and it used a proprietary enterprise fibre channel storage area network (SAN) to store the approximately 500 terabytes (TB) of video files needed for trailer projects. Create had customized its SAN to maximize performance, which meant that the solution required a lot of time to manage.

The SAN was six-figures expensive, with software alone costing up to $500,000.

Worst of all, as video files exploded in size, the SAN could not keep up with creative professionals’ needs. “When we get a trailer assignment, we ingest terabytes of movie footage from the studio, and it would take days to get those files loaded into our SAN before our video editors could start working,” explains Chris Slagel, Director of Technology at Create Advertising Group.

Video editors worked directly on the files in the SAN, over the network; they did not copy them locally to their workstations. Thus, each of about 35 editors needed at least 100 MB/s throughput to the storage, which was a productivity bottleneck. “Most trailers require multiple editors working in tandem, and when their machines started to generate local cache files, it would decimate our server performance,” says Anthony Hoit, Systems Architect at Create Advertising Group. “Our editors literally couldn’t work, which was a huge problem.”

Windows: A simpler, better, cheaper solution

In 2016, Create made the bold decision to jettison Macs for most of its creative staff, replacing them with high-performance workstations (HP Workstation Z840 and Z640) running the Windows 10 Enterprise operating system. At the same time, it replaced its high-end media storage solution with a software-defined storage solution from DataON based on Storage Spaces Direct technology in the Windows Server 2016 operating system. (See the technical addendum for solution details.)

DataON is a leading provider of hyper-converged cluster appliances and storage systems optimized for Windows Server environments. “We were one of the first vendors to pass the Windows Server Software-Defined (WSSD) program certification, and our Storage Spaces Direct solution for Create is one of many DataON deployments where we worked with the reference architecture that the Windows Server team creates and deliver a platform that suits the specific workload of the media and entertainment market,” says Howard Lo, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at DataON. “Our solution uses the best qualified components, is fully backed by Microsoft, and comes with a single point of support—us.”

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable, software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SANs. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features such as caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding—together with the latest hardware innovations like Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking and solid-state drives—deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

In fact, RDMA is the secret sauce that makes Create’s setup sing. It enables direct access from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one’s operating system and permitting high-throughput, low-latency networking. By enabling RDMA on both Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10, Create dramatically accelerates throughput so that file transfers between servers and workstations are blazingly fast—three times faster than the previous setup.

Faster computers produce better trailers

What does three times faster storage transfer mean to Create’s business? More awesome movie trailers, that’s what. The up-front time to ingest studio movie footage, which used to take several days, now takes hours, so editors can jump on projects immediately. This speedup is critical when studios want 24-hour turnaround.

Multiple editors can now effectively work on the same job at the same time, which not only speeds project completion but generates better ideas through real-time collaboration. “Using Windows Server Storage Spaces Direct, we can have multiple video editors working on a trailer at once, collaborating in real time, which produces more and better ideas—and gets trailers done sooner,” Slagel says.

Then there’s the immeasurable value of reducing technical difficulties. “The slightest technical problem can slow our video editors, graphic designers, and VR staff,” says Hoit. “Eliminating technical glitches and slowdowns frees our creative people to do their best work.”

60 percent less expensive to buy and manage

Like most creative shops, Create knows that it has to have the latest technology, but it would also rather spend money on talent than computers. Its software-defined storage solution is approximately 60 percent less expensive to buy and manage than the previous SAN, which leaves more funds for other things.

“We look at cost per usable terabyte, and the DataON/Windows Server storage solution costs about $200 per usable terabyte compared to $900 for our previous solution,” Slagel says. “By spending less on storage, we have more to spend on other things such as new broadcast displays and other technologies.”

Those savings are in addition to the workstation savings. As mentioned earlier, Create can buy three Windows 10 workstations for every Mac workstation and has already switched all its performance-hungry jobs to Windows workstations and 85 percent of all client computers to Windows.

Management time for the Windows workstation and storage setup is also drastically lower. “We have cut IT management time in half by switching to Windows,” Hoit says. “Using Network File System protocols in traditional SANs is very complex, with a lot of third-party software involved. This makes the cost of managing a Mac/NFS system astronomical compared to using the SMB3 protocol and SMB Direct on Windows 10 workstations. We have more time to help users and stay up to date on new technologies that can improve efficiency across the company.“

Create will soon outfit its VR team with a Storage Spaces Direct storage solution to accompany its Windows 10 workstations. “VR is a fast-growing part of our business, and the Windows workstations have drastically improved this team’s productivity,” says Slagel. “We can’t wait to see how much faster they can go with software-defined storage.”

Technical addendum: Deep dive on Create Advertising storage

Create uses four DataON S2D-3224i Hybrid All Flash servers configured as a Storage Spaces Direct Cluster. Each server has one direct-attached JBOD (DataON DNS-2608). Each server node and JBOD has (2 x 800 GB 2.5” Intel DC P3700 NVMe drives) for cache + (24 x HGST Ultrastar Helium 10 TB HDD drives) for capacity. Using NVMe for caching is new in Windows Server 2016 and is not possible with SAN and network-attached storage (NAS). Total storage capacity is therefore 4 x 24 x 10 TB = 960 TB raw, or about 450 TB usable (after mirroring).

Create uses mirror-accelerated parity resiliency (new in Windows Server 2016), which mixes three-way mirroring (33.3 percent efficient) with dual parity (50.0 percent efficient) to provide better storage density for capacity-conscious customers, at the expense of performance. Even so, using the industry-standard AJA benchmark, they can reach 2,700 MB/s reads and 600 MB/s of throughput, or over 800,000 IOPS!

In addition to replacing its expensive SAN storage with a Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct solution, Create replaced its Apple Mac workstations with Windows 10 workstations and put iWARP RDMA-enabled network cards (from Chelsio Communications) in both those workstations and its Windows Server 2016 servers. By fully leveraging the SMB3 over RDMA network fabric, the Create converged Storage Space Direct solution delivers end-to-end RDMA connectivity with high performance, ease of use, and seamless deployment.

Explore and learn more about Windows Server 2016 Storage Spaces Direct.