Storyhouse Productions Invests in the Future with Facilis HUB Systems
At Storyhouse, more than 50 NLE and audio systems access newly updated Facilis shared storage system locally and remotely in parallel.
Story House is a large and successful production company with offices in Berlin, Munich and Washington. The company serves the national and international market and specializes in a variety of documentary, digital and fiction formats. Storyhouse’s clients include major television broadcasters, media libraries and streaming services, including the BBC, National Geographic, BR, ZDF and ProSieben. The company has now invested in a new Facilis Hub system, which serves as shared storage for over 50 locally and remotely connected workstations. Thomas Sassenberg, Technical Director Storyhouse, and Thorsten Feldmann, CEO Systempiloten, announced the investment during IBC.
Shared storage from Facilis since 2013
Thomas Sassenberg explains: “As we work on a large number of productions in parallel, we installed a shared storage system in post-production back in 2013.” Thomas Sassenberg had previously worked for many years at the Storyhouse branch in Washington D.C., where Facilis was already being used. “The systems were so powerful and flexible that we wanted to bring them to Germany,” says Sassenberg. Thorsten Feldmann, Managing Director of Systempiloten in Cologne, then installed the first Facilis system at Storyhouse in Berlin. This system was in operation for almost eight years – an unusually long time. But this is precisely what makes the US manufacturer stand out, says Thorsten Feldmann: “The systems are simply of a high quality, and coupled with the good service from Facilis & Systempiloten, this kind of runtime is possible.”
Hybrid system for many clients
The new Storyhouse system is configured as a hybrid system so that both Ethernet clients and Fiber Channel SAN clients can be used. This makes the system very flexible: a grading suite, for example, has very high-performance requirements to process DPX files or handle 8K 4444 workflows. A Fibre Channel connection to the shared storage is essential for this. A simple editing suite, on the other hand, can get by with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection.
The HUB servers from Facilis offer this flexibility, “this is unique for a shared storage system,” says Thorsten Feldmann. At least as important is the fact that the systems are not restricted by licensing law. This is an important aspect, especially for a customer like Storyhouse, where many systems from different manufacturers such as Avid, Adobe or Blackmagic access the shared storage.
Of course, the performance of the system also plays an important role for Thomas Sassenberg. That’s why the Facilis hub system had to compete with another system in the decision-making process. “But Facilis was able to offer the better values in terms of performance, price-performance ratio and capacity,” says Thorsten Feldmann, “and it also scored better in terms of sustainability, power consumption and form factor.”
CTO Thomas Sassenberg adds: “We constantly have between 50 and 60 Avid / Adobe editing suites accessing the Facilis HUB systems in parallel, which comprises around 1.6 petabytes. Not many manufacturers can offer this kind of performance in a single system.”
This was also an important aspect, as Story House is geared towards the requirements of green production. “Major customers like ZDF also demand this of us, but that’s not the only reason we implement it. We are a company that dealt with sustainability aspects early on and made an effort to produce sustainably,” says Sassenberg.
Facilis installation at Story House
The Facilis HUB system at Story House consists of a FLASHPoint server with 48TB SSD and two Facilis HUB48 with hard disks, each with 768TB of storage. In this setup, FLASHPoint acts as a management, project and render server for the two Facilis HUB48 servers on which the media files are stored. Facilis Hub 48 can also be operated as a stand-alone server, but Storyhouse uses two of them purely as storage servers. “The customer can therefore configure their system individually according to their requirements – and also scale and expand it if necessary,” explains Thorsten Feldmann.
The two storage servers are each connected to the FLASHPoint via 64 Dual Fibre Channel as a failover. The advantage of Fibre Channel is that the latency for data access is lower than with an Ethernet connection. In terms of performance, the two storage servers are quite impressive: With 24 x 2TB SSD and 96 high-performance SATA drives per media server chassis, an aggregated throughput of over 10GB/s can be provided. This means that even the most demanding projects can be realized.
Thomas Sassenberg also repeatedly emphasizes the performance of the system. “The system runs stably even under high load, which really impressed me right from the start,” he says. It also copes very well with the demanding XDCAM and XAVC codec. “This codec is often used for multi-camera productions, many of which we work on. But not every system can handle it as well as Facilis,” reports Thomas Sassenberg.
On average, according to Sassenberg, Story House runs around 200 HD streams in parallel, all of which have to be processed by the Facilis system. In addition, there are copy jobs running in the background. Thorsten Feldmann puts it in a nutshell: “I always describe Facilis HUB as an all-you-can-eat system: there are no restrictions for the connected post-production systems, although you could certainly set that.”
Connection to the network
The FLASHPoint server and the HUB servers can be supplied with dual 10-25-40 or 100Gb Ethernet or 16Gb, 32Gb or 64Gb Fibre Channel cards. Up to ten clients can be connected directly to the server without a switch. Workgroups with automatic load balancing can also be created by installing a network switch. The exclusive Bandwidth Priority feature from Facilis ensures that the most important jobs always have the highest performance available without having to throttle the speed.
Remote connections
It goes without saying that a shared storage system must also support remote clients these days. “But when we had to provide a remote solution for productions from one day to the next at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic because there were suddenly travel restrictions everywhere, Facilis saved us. The system was so flexible that we were able to adapt it very quickly to the new working situation and set up remote workflows – and we were really grateful for that,” explains Thomas Sassenberg.
