How Much Will Your Bad Storage Habits Cost Your Facility?

As media companies move toward cloud storage, ideas about storage and infrastructure strategy are evolving. Traditional storage tiers are becoming less defined, backup practices are changing. But bad habits are the hardest to break, and there are certain storage sins that we see month in, month out. The worst part? These mistakes aren't just bad practice day to day - they could cost your facility thousands of pounds in the long term.

The number one issue we see with storage is a lack of long-term strategy, especially in growing facilities, says Technical Pre-Sales Consultant Phillip Boettcher, Jigsaw 24. The vast majority of facilities we work with have always archived footage for their clients, and that's definitely something most media companies expect a post house to do. But the fact is, now that so many people are shooting in higher resolutions or with higher shooting ratios, your primary storage is going to fill up fast. Strategizing how data moves through your facility needs to be something you do early and review often.

Let's take a look at some common mistakes 1. Relying on a random array of disks

Many new facilities don't have a formal archive process, instead dumping completed projects onto hard drives (or, more recently, into low-cost cloud storage) and leaving that as their archive. However, this system fails on almost every level, from data security (there are no access restrictions on a shelf full of drives) to immutability (it's easy to accidentally overwrite data) to accessibility (manually searching drives or unstructured cloud volumes will push your retrieval times up to days rather than hours).

2. Relying on proprietary formats

The cloud storage marketplace is crowded, and when choosing a provider you need to bear two contrasting points in mind. Firstly, scattering your projects over multiple cloud volumes from multiple vendors will make them harder to retrieve; secondly, that leaning too heavily on a single vendor can lock you into their workflow for the long term, either by locking your data into a proprietary format, using proprietary erasure coding formats to build redundancy into their systems, or using proprietary egress and transfer technologies to inflate the cost of migrating your data to a point where it's simply not viable.

3. Relying solely on your production storage

Production storage is expensive, which is why your live storage volumes should only ever be a temporary resting place for your media. However, we see many companies storing everything from live projects to deep archive on the same array and simply adding to it when they run out of space. This is a huge and unnecessary cost: projects you no longer access to can be moved to much more affordable archive formats, be that LTO, Glacier storage or long-term disk storage.

And because file sizes are constantly increasing, sticking to a tierless system like this is only going to get more expensive, with larger storage needing to be purchased more often. Plus, the more media you amass, the more expensive it will be to transfer to a different platform when you finally do adopt a futureproof archive strategy.

4. Relying on separate data silos

Another issue we see often is that of data siloing. Media that's no longer in use is placed in offline storage, a cloud volume or an LTO and forgotten about, with creatives unaware that content exists and can be re-versioned, or unable to access it in a timely way because the archive media is so isolated from their day-to-day storage. We've also seen facilities move from one system to another and leave behind silos in each, resulting in isolated pockets of media that are difficult to access and therefore unable to generate any further revenue.

Investing in your infrastructure strategy At the root of most of these failures is a lack of futureproofing. Having an effective, futureproof strategy for managing your storage will not only save you money, it can help you generate revenue.

There is a huge difference between simply having a copy of your data somewhere and actually being able to find, retrieve, and reuse said data, says Phillip. If you tell clients you're going to hold on to their data for five years, you should have a clear plan for where that data will be over that time period, how you'll ensure its integrity and security, and how you'll retrieve it when the time comes. Hand in hand with that, planning like this ensures your end result is an effective, comprehensive media library that helps your creatives remonetise your content, whether that's by reversioning work for a client, or finding clips you have the right to reuse rather than shooting something new.

While every facility is different, there are a few core principles you can stick to:

Make sure you files and their metadata are stored in open formats and that you're not going to be forced to follow rules that can make it difficult to move files in the long term.

Avoid platforms that force vendor lock-in or make removing your data unnecessarily difficult.

Avoid having all your copies of a given piece of media tied to a single provider. If you lose access to a given cloud volume, you should still be able to get your hands on a copy of the data.

As a corollary to this, ensure you have an effective method for searching for and retrieving data, no matter which platform it is in.

The advantages of a hybrid or multi-cloud approach Taking a hybrid or multi-cloud approach is one of the best ways to approach you long-term storage and infrastructure strategy, says Phill. By combining on-premise storage with an active archive for projects you're likely to revisit and a deep archive for media you're not going to use, you can strike a balance between keeping your data accessible and managing your ongoing storage costs. If

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