How The Media Bunker Manages 135TB of Sports Footage with Synology NAS Solutions (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: My name is Paul Bunker and I'm the director here at The Media Bunker, we're a 100% digital video production company. Sport is our passion and area of expertise and we travel all over the world working with global sports brands, but we also work with lots of agencies and we work with sports men and women elite talent directly as well. There's seven of us in the team working across London and the South Coast, producers, we've got editors, motion graphics guys, we've got operators, admin staff and our productions can be anything between ten seconds long all the way up to about 45 minutes in length. As our business has grown over the past seven years, we've faced three main challenges. Firstly, a regular shoot for us will be around two to three hundred gigs worth of data, so if you consider we're doing about three or four of those a week, that means over seven years we've accumulated a huge amount of data, around about a hundred terabytes all in. Then, how do three to four editors work at the same time from the same lot of footage without having to duplicate footage and using lots of other different drives as well? We didn't want to complicate our workflow, so we needed one consolidated way that everybody could access the footage at the same time. And finally, really important to us, it's the backup. Our business is built with lots of integrity, excellent customer service, we need to ensure that our footage is captured and stored with as much integrity as possible, so we needed a good backup solution. Our network engineer is a smart bloke and he was adamant that Synology would provide us with the best solutions. From 2015, we've developed our Synology network and we're currently using three NAS systems to fulfil our requirements. In our main office, where all of our archive is kept, we're using the Synology DS2419+, the DX1215 plus expansion unit, meaning that we use around 24 WD Red Pro hard drives and they vary between six and ten terabytes, giving us a capacity of around 135 terabytes of data. With the 2419+, the 10 gig connectivity means that five editors can all work at the same time, even when they're editing 4K footage, which is brilliant for us. We need that capacity to be able to work at those sort of speeds and we use our MacBook Pros to connect to that and plug in directly, so everybody is active at the same time. This entire NAS system is then backed up off-site using Synology's Hyper Backup software to our second NAS, which is the DS2415+, the DX1215 plus expansion unit as well, using about 18 hard drives in there. Again, using the WD Red Pro hard drive between six and ten terabytes, we know that all of our data is backed up safe in the event that we have a fire here or maybe there's a case of theft. And finally, our third NAS is in our new office in London. There's a shared folder between sites that ensures that editors can access the most recent footage in either location, giving us much better flexibility and then we can collaborate on projects across both sites. As well as the hardware, the Synology DSM operating system allows us to share and upload files from anywhere in the world, allowing us to be nimble and deliver on our clients' requests. And finally, as important as all of that, is the customer service that we receive from Synology as well. We're a small team, we don't actually have any in-house tech with us all the time. If we do have any slight issues or concerns with our Synology setup, their UK-based representatives are quick, efficient, and they're really keen to help. It's vital for us, time is very, very important for us and essential for the success of our business. And working with Synology has meant that we can deliver on all of our promises.