Imagine youre an animator in Japan. Your job is to design characters for an upcoming film, while your counterpart in India designs the background. As you work diligently, other artists around the world are working, producing the dialogue or score, while executives in Los Angeles anxiously await updates. But what happens when the director decides […]
Imagine youre an animator in Japan. Your job is to design characters for an upcoming film, while your counterpart in India designs the background. As you work diligently, other artists around the world are working, producing the dialogue or score, while executives in Los Angeles anxiously await updates. But what happens when the director decides his character should have a red shirt, instead of a yellow one? How do you synchronise petabytes of data generated daily?
In todays data-centric world, these types of data-synchronisation issues can make or break a film. Its important to ensure all parties on a project are
working with the most current files across the globe.
Managing metadata or the data about data in multimedia and film production environments, has become a task of epic proportions. With multimedia demands increasing and film shifting to digital, its not a matter of if this data will be stored in the cloud, its when; and once its there, securing, managing and providing immediate access to this data is a major concern.
According to a new market report by Transparency Market Research, the global big data market was worth USD 6.3 billion in 2012 and is expected to reach $48.3 billion by 2018.
As the volume of digital data grows, the associated metadata that stores the important ingredients of the bigger data streams, is crucial in disseminating huge blocks of information. Without it, the data is nothing more than a mess of unintelligible bits and bytes.
To resolve these challenges, production companies and studios are looking to manage metadata in such a way that all team members across the world can access, update and store the data as it is being manipulated.
Today, synchronisation, data accessibility and performance issues can be resolved by storing certain types of metadata in a relational distributed database management system and distributing the data geographically, thus providing project contributors with the response time they need.
Emerging technologies that fundamentally decentralise data greatly improve business resilience and provide users the ability to stay in sync with each other. Unlike conventional infrastructures where scale, redundancy and performance are increased by “scaling up”, these new approaches provide an architecture where capabilities are added by scaling out or simply adding identical nodes.
These systems automatically store data across nodes and deliver information when and where its needed. Information is replicated across multiple nodes to ensure availability and if a node fails, users are re-routed to other nodes so that productivity doesnt diminish.
In the entertainment industry, geographically distributed databases have the potential to automatically synchronise metadata, thus improving latency issues and enhancing the collaborative efforts of production teams.
Recently, theres been a tendency to consolidate data centres. The assumption is that consolidated data centres allow organisations to better control resource costs. Concerns about availability and performance, for users in remote locations, are often overlooked in light of the expense and complexity of achieving global scale-out with traditional database applications.
If all the required infrastructure components resided on comprehensive nodes, the nodes could be placed in small and remote locations. Since virtually all of the supporting infrastructure would be included in a node, performance and responsiveness would improve at each site.
Ongoing support costs would also be reduced because scaling in this way is much easier than with traditional deployments. As production facilities grow, a node can be easily added at that site.
Today, organisations are wrestling with ways to take advantage of cloud economics, while maintaining control of their data. Now is the time for technology that enables options for deploying on-premise, in the cloud, or a combination of both.
This is the next phase in truly enabling developers to deliver content that is consistent, highly available and accurate, while maintaining an elastic and robust infrastructure within the constraints of tight budgets and time frames.
Frank Huerta is CEO and Co-founder of TransLattice.
