-- WCPMedia Services is a leading innovator in the rapidly changing arena of entertainment media management. Its groundbreaking B2B, web-based platform WCPApp allows content owners to digitally store, manage, market and transcode media assets, and deliver them to distributors, broadcasters, video-on-demand services and other end users, with unprecedented speed and security.
The company is also helping media producers overcome geographic barriers and the constraints of working with physical media during the production phase. Recent projects include The Young Pope with Jude Law and Diane Keaton (see picture aside), Disney's Tini - The Big Change of Violetta and Black Butterfly with Antonio Banderas. Production media stored on its platform can be seamlessly reviewed and shared with directors, DITs, editors, post-production facilities, investors and other stakeholders in a controlled and coherent manner, anywhere in the world. Creative collaboration is improved; projects are finished faster.
One feature that differentiates WCP from other cloud-based media management solutions is its transcoding farm. As a basic standard service, it is used to automatically generate previews from a master video for the purposes of promotion and screening. More important, it can also transcode content according to any particular technical specifications required by the recipients. Quality control procedures can also be executed during upload or after transcoding.
WCP has implemented workflows to accommodate all possible transcoding requirements while delivering optimal quality. That includes such considerations as frame rate accuracy and scan type conversion. To ensure all this happens reliably and predictably, it employs several transcoding engines from the best market providers, including Snell, Telestream and Harmonic.
WCP has designed its infrastructure with scalability in mind in order to easily manage growth and traffic peaks. The ability to manage large data sets is, in fact, essential for storage purposes and the smooth operation of the front-end web application. It is even more critical for automatic online services provided, such as ultra-fast file transfers and, as mentioned above, transcoding on demand.
To support these processes, WCP has implemented a new type of architecture, embedding shared, ultra-fast storage layers into a virtual environment. This results in a boost in performance for the transcoding and QC engines that are true game changers. Running the platform under a virtual environment was a key strategic decision for WCP, explains WCPMedia Services VP Director of Operations Giovanni Contri. It facilitates flexibility, service continuity and scalability that the cloud platform otherwise would not permit.
A virtual system was a must in order to:
provide automatic backup of the OS, reducing the restore process for one server to less than 30 minutes,
make any hardware fault an old souvenir as the virtual architecture will move a server to alternate hardware in real-time and without losing process activity,
deploy new servers in less than 30 minutes, providing fast scalability of the WCP farm,
additionally, environments such as VmWare provide rich monitoring tools, facilitating control over everything from network traffic to CPU usage.
Needing to accommodate fast storage, shared among many servers operating under different operating systems and versions, WCP selected a SAN structure with a scalable 10Gb network, exporting SSD-based LUN using iSCSI protocol. An additional key component was a file-level-locking security system that could work with different file systems to ensure writing control of stored files into a volume and to prevent file corruption.
As part of our process of technical analysis and software selection, we were looking for a flexible and scalable SAN solution that could provide a solid file level locking security on Windows and Linux OS file systems, explains Contri. Our aim was to ensure writing control of the files stored into a volume and to prevent the file corruption.
WCPMedia Services technical and functional requirements were to integrate, into a unique storage volume, both Linux and Windows servers within a virtual environment for security and scalability.
After completing their due diligence, WCPMedia Services selected Tiger Technology Tiger Store shared storage workflow software, which:
is hardware agnostic,
works with heterogeneous operating systems,
is easy to install, configure and operate,
doesn't reduce SAN storage speed,
provides the best price-to-performance ratio compared with other similar solutions,
includes 24/7 technical support.
As video professionals, WCP engineers met Tiger Technology years ago while working with companies that specialized in the distribution and integration of professional equipment for television, cinema and telecommunications. Tiger software products are among the best solutions robust and easy to manage shared storage, and are also price competitive. In addition, as Tiger is hardware agnostic, it was possible to reuse valuable hardware storage already present at client site.
We also knew, from our previous experience with Tiger, that 24/7 technical support is always available, prompt and competent in responding, says Contri. Finally, with Tiger Store, WCP can offer its clients a very rich, automatic and scalable video solution over the web, providing professional media transcoding and QC functions without wasting time and money.
Tiger's technical support team assisted WCP through the set up phase. Tiger Store has provided the performance and reliability we hoped for, Contri observes. We now have a unique configuration that, for the first time, has Tiger Store running in a virtual environment.
Tiger Store is helping WCPMedia Services provide its media and entertainment
