CASE STUDY
Digital Graffiti Expands with Facilis TerraBlock SAN
Digital Graffiti manages post production for some of the most popular reality series on Television, including TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress” and truTV’s “Impractical Jokers.” With offices in New York, Knoxville and Los Angeles, the company has mastered the art of multi-tasking – working on five to seven shows per month, rolling multiple episodes across three facilities.
Over the last five years, Digital Graffiti built a solid shared storage infrastructure to handle the large volume of media that reality TV requires. Nick Kneece, IT Manager at Digital Graffiti said, “Reality shows eat up a ton of space, so it’s mission critical that we have a strong storage backbone in place, especially when working with such tight deadlines. I don’t see how we could handle everything we do without it.”
Between the New York and Knoxville offices, Digital Graffiti owns five TerraBlock Shared Storage Systems connected to 34 Avid workstations. The Knoxville facility is used for online editing, while offline editing takes place in the New York City studio. To expand storage capacity in both locations, Digital Graffiti recently upgraded two of its TerraBlock systems – one in New York and another in Knoxville.
“I’ve looked into other storage options, but TerraBlock has all the capabilities and bandwidth we need at a price its competitors can’t beat. It’s affordable, simple and a million times faster than local storage,” shared Kneece. “We handle massive amounts of media every day, but no matter how close we come to capacity, the systems just keep working; they run like clockwork. Why would we not continue to use hardware like that?”
Since the upgrade, Digital Graffiti has significantly increased its drive size and bandwidth. Kneece expressed, “As more clients come to us with uncompressed high-res files, we need more space, and the new TerraBlocks give us the ability to expand and install new workstations. We can chain them together to add more bandwidth without disturbing existing storage. That’s always a huge boon.”
TerraBlock has also eliminated the need for Digital Graffiti to consolidate or move footage onto portable hard drives – thus lowering the risk for media loss. Kneece shared, “If a drive fails, we don’t have to worry. We’re protected with the RAID 5 capabilities in TerraBlock.”
He concluded, “We’ve had nothing but good feedback from our editors on the upgrade. They like being able to jump from machine to machine to access the same data. If one station isn’t working, they can move to another and access the same media through the TerraBlock, which has minimized downtime. It’s an added bonus that Facilis’ support has also always been so fast and helpful.”
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