Small Tree Provides End-to-End Workflow Solution for Advertising Agency

Snitily Carr, a full-service advertising agency with roots in video production, needed to expand its capability to meet the growing needs of the agency's clients. New tactics and technology provided more opportunities to serve clients, and the company now needed a digital media workflow strategy to match.

To meet those challenges, the medium-sized agency called upon Small Tree to provide an end-to-end shared storage and networking environment that also included media asset management through axle Video, and LTO tape-based archival through Cache-A.

This is our first Small Tree box, said Rhett McClure, Video Producer for Snitily Carr. It's great bang for the buck. So much so, that for the amount of storage we needed and the money we saved working with Small Tree, we were able to include media asset management as well as archival tape backup in the budget. The cost of the turnkey system from Small Tree was what others were quoting us for storage alone.

Snitily Carr provides traditional and digital marketing and production services for customers in a variety of vertical markets including healthcare, agriculture, financial services and retail.

Small Tree has been very easy to work with, said McClure. We've been plotting this whole transition for about 18 months and considered 10 or 12 different options over that time, as we tweaked what parts would fit where, and just how much storage and networking infrastructure made sense.

The agency now has a combination of both 10GbE and GbE workstations running Adobe Creative Suite accessing the TitaniumZ-8 storage server, including both iMacs via Thunderbolt to 10GbE, and a DaVinci Resolve color grading suite via 10GbE and PCIe.

Media asset management and transcoding duties are handled by axle Video's Gear appliance, which offers a radically simple media management solution at low cost. Gear combines two rack mounted Mac minis in a tightly-coupled configuration with axle and Telestream software to create an optimized media management and transcode appliance in 1U of rack space. The axle Gear system gives wider access to the contents of the TitaniumZ from laptops and iPads anywhere in the Snitily Carr organization, by creating searchable low-res proxies of all media files on the storage. Axle Gear also provides a searchable browser interface with custom metadata, timeline-based selects and review and approval workflows.

Completing the ingest to export workflow solution, Small Tree partnered with Serial Scene, a Chicago-based Cache-A authorized systems integrator, to handle the archival portion using a Pro-Cache6 LTO tape drive appliance.

With the TitaniumZ's ability to support a variety of content creation software, its flexible mix of both GbE and 10GbE configuration options as well as future-proofed expansion possibilities, TitaniumZ is designed and tested to handle real-world content creation tasks not just today, but into the future as well.

It's really about serving our clients in a better way. Small Tree has made our creation process a lot easier, said McClure, and We can throw pretty much anything at it and it doesn't complain.

For more information about Small Tree and its growing line of shared storage and networking products, visit http://www.small-tree.com. Follow Small Tree on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/SmallTreeComm or on Twitter @SmallTreeComm.

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