Blue Sky
We are very satisfied with the high and stable transfer speed Presto File Server has delivered, it has fully replaced our previous transfer tools. And with its flexibility in VDSM deployment and Btrfs file system support, now we are able to consolidate all the services to one single server in a storage-efficient fashion. Truly an all-in-one solution may I say. Josef Barak, CIO/CTO of Blue Sky Film Distribution a.s.
The Company
Blue Sky is a vertically integrated film distribution company operating globally with branches located in USA and Africa. They partner with companies that are mostly content creators, such as big film studios, independent producers and directors. Blue Sky also plays an important role as content provider to end-customers, including cinemas, film festivals, and online libraries like iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, Microsoft Xbox, Amazon Prime and others, while also serves thousands of customers worldwide.
Among these partnerships, Blue Sky is recognized as one of the 50 "Apple iTunes Aggregator" worldwide known for its expertise in contributing content in correct format to iTunes, and also one of the few production houses worldwide that are certified as "Encoding House" that can provide content with quality that reaches 90%+ Apple QC pass rate, making Blue Sky the reliable partner to more and more artists and copyright owners internationally when distributing their works to iTunes.
The Challenge
The need in speeding up data exchange is universal, for a standard movie package in this industry, known as DCP (Digital Cinema Package), usually sizes 50-150 GB that overseas transfer through common tools can be impractical. However, only some of their partners own data transfer acceleration solutions, while the majority of Blue Sky's partners don't.
Also, to cope with partner's varied IT restrictions on privacy settings and transfer protocols, Blue Sky has to distribute and collect data from scattered storage to meet the specifications of the different adopted tools, making it hard to manage the tangled permission settings for each partner and maintain the different licenses, while costing extra time and expense on storage. When the company needs to distribute one file to different partners, the same file requires multiple copies, causing unavoidable redundancies and extra time on file confirmation.
Blue Sky had therefore started looking for a new solution to replace the previously adopted ones.
The fundamental criteria would be the capability of delivering high-speed, continuous and resumable transfer under different internet conditions to ensure the file consistency so to meet the strict quality checks.
Also, the new tool was expected to be flexible that it can fit into different physical or virtualized environments in accordance with partners' varied IT restrictions and limitations on privacy settings and transfer protocols, frictionlessly.
Most of all, it should be centralized and easy to manage.
The Solution
"Our experience with Synology products has been wonderful for many years now, and we were glad to learn that Synology introduced Presto File Server for reliable large file transfer", states Josef Barak, CIO/CTO of Blue Sky Film Distribution a.s..
This time, Blue Sky purchased a RS3617xs with 12 x 10TB HDD forming a RAID 6, then built six completely isolated virtual instances serving different purposes that Blue Sky needs, upon the virtual DSM running on the device, with each of the instances equipped with their own VLAN to meet the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) security regulations on different network accessibility to different devices.
While four of the instances take care of the internal services including VPN services and central storage for internal use, Presto File Server and a 300 Mbps license have been installed and deployed on one of the six instances, on which every partner owns a folder with data and account credentials independent from each other. Now Blue Sky can distribute the content to many partners concurrently on one single server. Thanks to the Btrfs file system enabled on Synology NAS, Blue Sky only needs one physical copy of the same file, freeing up great capacity for more contents to come.
Blue Sky then sent emails to partners with their login credentials, and the updated available transfer options, along with the installers of the user-friendly Presto desktop client, without requiring extra training for their partners. All the connection status, transfer activities and resource control can be monitored and managed on a centralized panel on the server.
For further data protection, Blue Sky smartly leverages Hyper Backup to backup the RS3617xs to DS1513+ every night, making sure the latest version of data will be accessible when disaster occurs.
The Benefits
Presto File Server's proven performance in speeding up file transfer perfectly replaced what the previous solutions had brought to Blue Sky.
Together with Presto File Server License's capability in deployment on virtual environments, Blue Sky can finally consolidate all the services on one single server, where user permission management is also centralized and consistent, saving Blue Sky and its partners great amount of time, effort and chances for technical errors when coping with their international growth. In addition, Presto File Server provides great flexibility in its licensing policy which allows to Bluesky easily scale up the bandwidth they need as the company grows.
Centralized storage that supports Btrfs file system also opened the door for Blue Sky to reducing storage usage due to unnecessary redundancies, as Btrfs snapshots and copy-on-write effectively decreased the amount of the data stored and significantly accelerated workload.
This versatile total data solution by Synology further had Blue Sky enjoy a 60% off in total cost compared with the previously used transfer accelerator.
Last, Blue Sky also finds itself benefitting from Synology's data security capability as being authorized as a CNA (CVE Numbering Authority) by MITRE Corporation. Blue Sky has been keen on potential security threats from deployed technologies and solutions. "Assigning the CVE IDs of its own vulnerabilities is essential to vendors who take security issues seriously." concluded Mr. Tuček, the security expert at Blue Sky.
Recommended Models
- RS3617xs
Recommended Features
- Presto File Server
- Enhanced storage efficiency and low TCO
- One consolidate storage saving costs on hardware expense
- Saving free space with Btrfs copy-on-write (CoW) capability