Digital Asset Management
Exablox scale-out NAS helps you deal with rapidly the ever increasing storage capacity demands of your digital assets
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As digital content in the form of documents and rich media such as images and video are being generated each day, the infrastructure and people resources devoted to manage these escalating digital assets are being stretched. Digital asset management solutions help streamline the complex workflow associated with content production, processing, repurposing, access and distribution. As a result, organizations enjoy significant efficiencies to their digital asset lifecycle management workflow and are able to reuse and monetize their valuable digital assets more effectively.
Challenges
The simplification of digital asset lifecycle workflow, invariably, leads to higher velocity in digital data generation placing significant stress on the underlying storage infrastructure. Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution deployments typically rely on inflexible data storage—legacy storage infrastructure such as scale-up storage-area network or network-attached storage, which can cause significant challenges.
As data volume grows 60-80% per year, legacy storage systems–based on scale-up architectures reach a scalability limit and the only available options are to either add another storage island or perform a fork-lift upgrade by replacing the existing infrastructure. The consequences are sprawling storage silos that are complicated to manage and result in significant capital expenses. There is no investment protection and it ultimately leads to spiraling costs. Notably, a failure to provision the appropriate amount of storage can severely impact user-experience if storage is under provisioned and waste capital if over provisioned. This results in shifting of the cost burden from digital asset management to storage management.
Fortunately, there are new storage architectures and approaches to dramatically simplify the burden of storage management associated with DAM solutions and drive down costs.
Solution
The data volume and growth of digital assets managed by DAM solutions is an order of magnitude higher than that of typical enterprise data. To keep up with such stringent demands, DAM solutions require the backend NAS storage infrastructure to be scalable while being easy to manage.
The Exablox OneBlox & OneSystem
Exablox delivers scalable storage solutions – OneBlox, a powerful, yet simple, scale-out storage appliance, coupled with OneSystem, a cloud-based storage management service. The solution has been designed from ground-up to fully exploit today's advances in storage technologies to deliver a single infrastructure that integrates advanced storage features and brings storage management simplicity across multiple fronts. OneBlox is a purpose-built appliance with all enterprise-grade features built-in such as continuous data protection, inline de-duplication, encryption and disaster recovery and is largely automated with no need for expertise to setup and operate. The unique scale-out, converged storage appliance consolidates primary data as well as the backup and archival data in a single, simple to use storage infrastructure.
Exablox enables organizations to:
- Eliminate storage management complexity
- Scale effortlessly
- Optimize storage capacity
- Protect information assets
- Improve total cost of ownership
Exablox for Digital Asset Management
Exablox offers a new and an efficient approach to storage infrastructure for DAM solutions. By combining a DAM solution with the Exablox OneBlox as the global repository for digital assets, organizations can eliminate inefficiencies and bottlenecks associated with legacy storage environments.
Tame data and storage capacity growth
- Drive down the storage capacity requirements by providing multiple business units their own their versions of digital assets, yet with built-in, inline de-duplication store only a single copy
- Scale performance non-disruptively by simply adding additional OneBlox appliances into a cluster "ring" with zero configuration
- Grow capacity on demand with no upfront investments. Add capacity granularly, one disk at a time, and have the aggregate capacity immediately available for applications and users
Dramatically simplify the storage management
- Provision added capacity instantaneously since there is no RAID, volume or LUNs to configure. Local ring-level replication protects data from multiple disk or node failures and eliminates the need for legacy RAID protection schemes that drives management complexity.
- Remove and replace failed disks (or nodes in the cluster) with no disruption to data services and no reconfiguration of storage
- Manage on-premises OneBlox storage systems from any browser with OneSystem
- Experience a simplified storage management workflow that is visual, point-and-click, drag-and-drop and directly actionable
Safeguard valuable digital assets
- Safeguard from dual disk or two OneBlox node failures
- Recover easily previous versions of files from space-optimized, continuous snapshots without time-consuming restores from backups
- Protect data with automatic encryption – all information written to OneBlox is encrypted (in-line) with AES 256 before written to physical disk. Failed or obsolete drives are unreadable and can be simply removed and recycled
- Protect against failure of a ring or entire site with real-time remote replication. The WAN usage is optimized as only the changed and de-duplicated information is replicated to the remote OneBlox ring
Conclusion
Digital Asset Management significantly simplifies the typically complex workflow associated with content production, processing, repurposing, access and distribution. But selecting the right storage infrastructure to deploy and scale your digital asset management environment is critical to containing costs and ensuring that end-user experience is not impacted. Exablox offers a unique solution, with its OneBlox and OneSystem, that enables organizations to cost efficiently leverage their storage infrastructure to manage their digital assets.
Download the Exablox Digital Asset Management Brief Datasheet (PDF).