The Battle Between Corporate Creatives Versus Centralized IT
What happens when two departments don’t see eye to eye? Competing priorities and undercover operations. This is the case of the creative content creators (the data creators) versus centralized IT (the data managers/handlers). When it comes to choosing data storage, the creatives prioritize speed, collaboration, and ease of use while IT focuses on maintaining security, data integrity, business continuity, scalability, and costs. When these two sides don’t agree, the result is what’s known as shadow IT operations.
Shadow IT operations by the numbers:
Media Workflows Require Unique High-Performance Needs
Media workflows are unique in two ways: 1) High-resolution video files require massive storage capacity and high-throughput delivery performance to support high-bandwidth, low-latency needs. 2) Every media workflow is different, and no media department will have the same set of tools, processes, or even team size and makeup. Some will have teams that work purely in the office. Some will have widely dispersed teams that work within the office and across geographies. Some media departments will work with external parties as well. Creatives like you need workflow freedom and flexibility, not rigidness or complexity. General-purpose data storage systems cannot measure up to your specific requirements for interoperability, shared collaboration, and for scale.
Without a media-centric storage solution, your creativity will suffer:
- Slow file access and lag when editing 4K/8K or multi-camera footage across shared drives
- Version chaos and data sprawl with assets spread across external drives, cloud folders, and IT-unapproved personal devices
- Limited collaboration since multiple editors can’t work simultaneously without overwriting files
- Data loss risk can occur when local drives or ad-hoc cloud storage can’t safely secure massive raw footage
- Long upload/download times that can’t keep up with video throughput needs
Desired NAS Features for Creatives
- High-performance throughput for real-time editing
- Centralized asset storage that allows for seamless collaboration
- Can support growing capacity needs—500-1 PB+
- Multi-user, concurrent editing support with popular creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve
- Automatic versioning and backups to prevent accidental overwrites
- Integration with existing workflows—mountable via SMB/NFS, easy for non-technical staff
The Misunderstood IT Decision Maker
IT departments like yours have it difficult. It’s challenging to make others understand that you’re not trying to make their job harder; you’re just trying to keep everything secure and future-proofed, while managing costs, and also balancing the needs of the entire company. Creative departments unknowingly put everyone at risk when they purchase unsanctioned technology. So what can you do to give choosy creatives what they desire without jeopardizing your job?
IT Questions When Choosing Creative Data Storage
- How many concurrent editors or color bays do you have? What resolutions and codecs is the creative team working with (4K, 6K, 8K, RAW, DPX)?
- What network infrastructure do you currently have?
- How many TBs or PBs of video assets is generated per month/year? What is expected growth? How many creative projects per month?
- What is your budget for storage + support over 3 years?
- What marketing/creative tools does the creative team work with and how do you handle network connectivity (10/25/40/100 GbE), especially externally?
Dedicated to Creative Needs
For over a decade, OpenDrives’ software-defined data storage platform, Atlas, has been powering some of the most demanding media production workflows. Technology should never be a barrier to the creative process, and OpenDrives understands this best because we were once creatives ourselves. Unlike our competitive peers with general-purpose storage systems, Atlas focuses on the high-throughput delivery of large files that our creative peers like you crave.
Atlas’ simplicity, interoperability, and speed empower you to unleash your full creative potential by pushing the limits of what you can achieve. Of course, Atlas also offers the data integrity, security, and resiliency features savvy IT professionals look for to ensure data is protected and accessible. As a result, Atlas has been widely recognized by Hollywood networks, video production studios, and advertising agencies, which operate similarly to corporate creative teams like yours, for driving highly performant, collaborative, reliable, and easy-to-use storage environments.
The Atlas Corporate Creative Solution bundle combines all the features and capabilities that have made Atlas so sought after within media and entertainment circles. Our powerful Atlas Performance Engine liquidizes and serves video content to critical applications at blazing speeds. You get the flexibility to launch the applications critical to your workflow like data movers and orchestration tools (like MASV), as well as the ability to connect to your assets in the cloud with full browsing capability in a familiar file/folder environment.
What you get is a right-priced bundle that never sacrifices performance, integrates into your existing workflow, and doesn’t punish scale or growth. Best of all, it’s IT friendly too.
Benefits for the Never-Idle Creatives
Understands IT Requirements
An IT administrator’s job is not easy, and we get that, which is why we built this solution to cater not only to the creatives, but to you. Not only do you have to serve the needs of the entire organization, you also have to balance individual department needs with what’s best for the overall company. You’re the one that must consider data delivery performance, plus all the other things that others may deprioritize like the security, integrity, accessibility, recoverability, and cost of data across the board. Unfortunately, this usually results in friction between you and the creatives you serve. They want speed and ease; you have IT data governance requirements you need to uphold.
If you’re one of those special cases where you’re both an IT and a creative, it must get frustrating having to prioritize practical general-purpose storage requirements like scalability, redundancy, recovery, and support over keeping your creativity from having to wait for storage performance. Learn why the LA Kings chose Atlas for their corporate creative marketing needs.
Thankfully, with the Atlas Corporate Creative Solution, you don’t have to choose. You get a solution that:
- extends your data governance and overall security posture requirements
- allows you to scale-up cost predictably thanks to Atlas’ unlimited capacity licensing model
- lowers downtime risks with the Dual Node bundle option, which includes Active/Passive High Availability (HA)
Benefits for the “Must Always Support, But Never Increase Risk” IT Admins
What’s Under the Hood
OpenDrives’ powerful and unique Atlas Performance Engine combines widely used open-source tools with our engineering to deliver the best balance of low-latency media file delivery, ease of use, and market cost. It is a reflection of our engineering expertise in unstructured data workflows that keep your creative productions running seamlessly all day long. It combines unique and intelligent data-handling and tiering capabilities with automation, data integrity, and most importantly of all, blazing-fast speed.
Here’s what’s included:
Customized kernel, services, software tools, and latency-focused system tuning maximizes consistent high performance for large, unstructured datasets
Adobe Accelerator—our specialized approach to shared caching makes mounting and rendering Premiere Pro projects faster and more efficient, especially for collaborative teams
Fully inline caching analyzes data in real time to maximize block sizing, while inline compression reduces the block footprint on disk
Automated block-level data promotion from bulk storage to cache tiers maximizes RAM/NVMe utilization, thereby minimizing the capacity and cost requirements to achieve low latencies and high performance
Intelligent prefetching accelerates data access by promoting data to the system cache, then automatically predicting and serving up the most popular, requested data
Provides All Flash Array performance in a hybrid (HDD/NVMe) solution, which significantly reduces total cost of ownership and scaling
Algorithmically monitors data usage to automatically pin hot data to caching tiers
*Provided results based on specific testing conditions set against three enterprise general-purpose storage competitors. Performance will vary based on real-world environment and conditions.
Atlas Corporate Creative Features and Capabilities
| Feature | Single Node (Ceres) | Dual Node (Eos) |
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Network Sharing (SMB and/or NFS and/or S3) – Connect to your media and projects through open-standard networking protocols. |
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Local Users/Permissions – Fine tune and control the access your team has to your media assets. Choose who can administer your system and determine user and group permissions. |
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Atlas Performance Engine – Keep creative productions running seamlessly all day long with the Atlas Performance Engine, which combines the best open source has to offer, along with our engineering expertise in unstructured data workflows, offering unique and intelligent data-handling capabilities with automation, data integrity, and most importantly of all, blazing-fast speeds. |
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Advanced Checksums for data integrity – Work with confidence knowing that your data remains 100% pristine, from capture to delivery. With hierarchical checksums, checksums are stored on disks that are separate from your data to ensure data is not corrupted during transit. |
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Routines Engine – Increase your productivity and operational efficiency with the ability to schedule automated tasks according to your preferences. |
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Local Snapshots – Record any data changes and recover your previous data without impacting performance. Also retrieve lost or corrupted files and datasets without having to wait for an entire system’s worth of data to restore. Helpful for ransomware protection and business continuity. |
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Remote Snapshots – Replicate snapshots to a remote data source as a separate precaution for extra data protection and disaster recovery. |
Optional | Optional |
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Analytics & Diagnostic Tools and Notifications – Understand the state of your system with a homepage analytics dashboard that monitors capacity and system performance. System diagnostic reports further detail a snapshot of system configuration, logs, and various storage system troubleshooting data. |
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Active Directory / LDAP+Kerberos – Handle authorization and authentication while enforcing security policies with Active Directory centralized data management. Authorize access and manage user identity with LDAP, and handle secure logins with Kerberos. |
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SAML/0Auth 2.0 Authentication/Okta – Work with industry-standard digital access and authorization services, including SAML/0Auth 2.0 Authentication/Okta to extend your security posture. |
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NFS over RDMA (NFSoRDMA) Ready – Improves performance of NFS by leveraging RDMA (RoCE) to allow systems more efficient access to data resident in memory, bypassing the CPU and OS. |
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Docker Containerization – Running containers directly on storage helps to bring the applications closer to your data, increasing performance while decreasing latency. Containers also help to streamline costs by running only the necessary application dependencies, which reduces resource needs and operational oversight. |
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API Access – Leverage APIs to programmatically interact with your storage, opening up doors to automation and deeper workflow integration in your environment. |
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24/7 World-Class Domestic Support – Get the proper support you need 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by locally based media technicians and engineers who have real-world creative experience. |
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Mount Manager – S3 – Mount an external S3 data source and reshare it as a NAS share to experience real-time browsing with files and folders. |
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Mount Manager – NFS/SMB – Allows you to connect another data source in your environment to your Atlas platform over NFS and SMB. Leverage Atlas’ performance with your other storage sources and seamlessly integrate multiple datasets through one platform for your team. |
Optional | Optional |
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Single Pane-of-Glass (SPOG) Multi-System UI – Simply manage and administer multiple systems in a single interface. |
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Active/Passive High Availability – Ensure business continuity and eliminate expensive downtime with our no-single-point-of-failure solution. In the result of a catastrophic failure of an active compute node, Atlas will readily transition services to the formerly passive node, ensuring high productivity. |
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| Software Price – Does not include hardware or installation. Reflects popular 3-year support plan | $47,840.90 | $66,817.88 |
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Who is the ideal customer for the Corporate Creative Solution?
The Corporate Creative Solution is best for content creators who work for corporations outside of the traditional media and entertainment space (like Hollywood networks, studios, broadcasters, and streaming services), who creative content for a living. Some examples include: creative/video production departments and internal agencies working in retail or e-commerce or financial services whose content spans across social media, corporate communications, live streaming, AR/VR, etc. Unlike media and entertainment companies, corporate creatives do not usually have the autonomy to purchase technology without consulting with their centralized IT department. The Atlas Corporate Creative Solution gives creative teams the speed they crave and IT departments the control they demand.
Choose the Atlas Corporate Creative Solution if you have:
- a creative team of 50+ concurrent users
- 500-2 PB+ capacity needs
- specific support needs that require real-world media/creative engineering expertise alongside enterprise IT proficiency
What is the main difference between the Atlas Corporate Creative Solution’s two certified hardware options and software bundles?
Unlike traditional data storage solutions, Atlas does not charge per capacity or for higher performance or for unwanted features. Atlas’ composable software design has allowed us to provide you with two competitively priced options: a single node option that does not include Active/Passive High Availability and a dual node option with Active/Passive High Availability included. If your environment requires little to no downtime and uninterrupted productivity at all times, we recommend you choose the dual node option. Thankfully, if you choose to start with the single node option, it will be easy to upgrade to dual node should you need the added failover protection.
What other data storage systems or network-attached storage solutions (NAS) are similar to OpenDrives’ Atlas Corporate Creative Solution?
We hate to brag, but our composable design offering unlimited capacity is unique to OpenDrives. Typically, you will have to pay as you grow (pay-per-capacity) or as you add more features or require more performance. As a software-defined company that understands media workflows best, we’ll never punish you for wanting more performance or for needing interoperability to integrate into your existing workflow. Performance is only underpinned by the supporting hardware. We created two software bundles that offer the performance creatives need with IT-approved requirements that reduce IT overhead, keep costs predictable, and improves overall security posture. Other data storage options are either too general purpose or too niche. If we had to provide a list of similar competitors, you can look at Dell, QNAP, or TrueNAS (which are popular IT choices) or creative-friendly Studio Network Solutions or EditShare (which don’t meet IT’s specific enterprise security and compliance requirements out of the box).
Why should I choose Atlas?
We get that you have options. Here’s why the Atlas Corporate Creative Solution is the ideal solution for both corporate creatives and enterprise IT teams:
- studio-grade performance + enterprise total cost of ownership predictability with our unlimited capacity pricing model
- up to 25 GB/s throughput and tiered NVMe/RAM caching so you’re never sitting idle waiting for transfers, rendering, or mounting
- implement your ideal security posture with AD/LADAP, Active/Passive High Availability, and single-pane-of-glass UI management
- open standards and protocols allow you to integrate into your existing workflow, connect to other data sources and consolidate workloads, and extend your corporate and security policies
- complete more projects/month while performing higher-resolution video workflows
- IT-improved utilization, avoid cloud egress fees, manage scale, future proof your storage with features that grow with you and your growing project library
- add what you need without having to rip and replace
Download the Solution Brief
Here’s a convenient handout that includes the solution overview, feature bundle options, and price.
