House of Post Production future-proofs IT infrastructure with leading edge NAS Storage
“The performance of the Huawei OceanStor N8000 series supports our business now and will continue to do so in the future. The storage solution delivers high performance and is fully scalable. The quality of our IT equipment has attracted some of the best technicians and editors in the industry, and we’re expecting rapid growth due to this combination of strong talent and powerful IT infrastructure.”
Director at Rain: House of Post Production, Mike Bhatt
Boutique post-production house, Rain, selects Huawei for storage solution which supports creative delivery and company growth
Background
Rain: House of Post Production were building a new office at the centre of the UK media world in Soho, and took the opportunity to build a high quality IT infrastructure from scratch in order to deliver high value, top quality work. The aim was to create the IT facility to support a boutique post production house focusing on low- to medium-end feature films, TV and short form broadcasts and corporate film work. The company was keen to install a solution which not only met their high quality standards for launching the facility, but provided scalable options which wouldn’t require significant re-investment as the company grew to meet demand.
Key Challenges
The key concern was to find a high performance solution which supported the high level work to be carried out at Rain. As well as delivering best-in-class infrastructure, Rain wanted to look to the future and install IT storage which was scalable at a competitive price, and with minimal disruption. Finally, given to the fast pace of the media world and demanding deadlines, Rain required a solution which delivered not only fast performance, but was also supported by rapid and comprehensive technical support.
Solution
Rain selected Huawei’s OceanStor N8300 solution with 50TB of usable storage from the Huawei OceanStor N8000 series. The network attached storage from the OceanStor N8000 series offered a high availability solution delivering up to 15 petabytes of capacity. The solution also offers Dynamic Storage Tiering (DST) that reduces ongoing expenditure by appropriately migrating data to FC, SAS, SATA or SSD storage depending on access frequency.
Huawei have a strong heritage in the broadcast industry and coupled their understanding of broadcast media with a bespoke, partnership approach to adapt their solution to exactly match Rain’s demands.
Huawei recognised that with performance being paramount and downtime being costly for the organisation, it was not just a case of technical reliability – providing expert technical support on demand also needed to be part of the package.
Rain has already worked on a combination of audio, advertisement, documentary and VFX work from prominent clients including the Discovery Channel, the BBC and ITV.
End User Benefits
“The performance of our IT suite is already paying dividends,” says Mike Bhatt, Director of Rain in London. “The equipment is state-of-the-art, and the varied high level work we do is easily supported by a best-in-class IT infrastructure which gives great results and has also meant that Rain is a desirable place to work.”
Another key benefit for Rain was the customer-focused approach. The team was helpful both during the sales and implementation process in ensuring that Rain had a solution which met their needs and support technicians who understood the complex and often competing demands of the media broadcast industry.
Future Development
Future expansion was a key priority for Rain. They required a solution which offered swift scalability with minimum disruption to match the demands of the broadcast market. Their selection of the Huawei OceanStor N8000 Series certainly reflected this priority. Talking about Rain’s future plans and how the Huawei products matched their strategy, Director Mike Bhatt said:
“The N8300 delivers the fastest NAS in the world, and that made it very hard for us to resist. Ultimately, though, what sold the solution to us was the scalability. I’ve seen situations where upgrades and expansions cost as much as the original implementation, but with Huawei the cost of scalability comes in at about 10% of the original implementation cost. Having a provider who not only took the time to understand our current demands but also operated on a model which matched well with our future plans was as powerful a selling point for us as the reliability and performance.”
Following the success in London, Rain are planning to open further offices in Cardiff and MediaCityUK in Manchester, and will be deploying the same IT infrastructure in order to replicate their success.
About Rain: House of Post Production
Rain is a boutique high-end post-production company based in the renowned creative district, Golden Square in London. The company offers a range of post production services for the feature films, TV broadcast, short form broadcast, corporate and independent market segments.
About Huawei
Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Through our dedication to customer-centric innovation and strong partnerships, we have established end-to-end advantages in telecom networks, devices and cloud computing. We are committed to creating maximum value for enterprises and consumers by providing competitive solutions and services. Our products and solutions have been deployed in over 140 countries, serving more than one third of the world’s population. For more information visit: www.huawei.com/enterprise
