The Film Screen Comes Alive with Dell PowerScale and Marvel Studios
Everyone loves a great film. Whether it’s a fun night out with friends or eagerly anticipating the release of your favorite movie, movies evoke a range of emotions that are engrained in our memories. And while a movie playing on the big screen captivates us, behind the scenes there’s a media technology team working hard to keep everything running smoothly. Every movie produces a vast amount of data that must be stored and processed over several different environments. This creates complexity when it comes to managing and moving data in the most efficient way possible. File transfer delays and latency, for example, equate to lost movie production time.
In a recent video published as a part of The Advanced Imaging Society’s educational series, Eddie Drake, head of technology at Marvel Studios, and Evan Jacobs, creative finishing supervisor at Marvel Studios, shared their story of working with Dell’s PowerScale solution and highlighted their journey to evaluate and streamline Marvel’s workflows and storage footprint.
Eddie shared that Marvel’s 20 different storage vendors and a “mix and match of storage” was unsustainable. Having an easier way to manage and maintain all their infrastructure was key, but as Evan describes, Marvel’s needs went beyond storage. They also needed better data management – leveraging technology to move files around faster. When Evan started at Marvel 10 years ago, his team spent a lot of time waiting for files – especially file transfers from outside partner companies.
Marvel faced the challenge head-on and streamlined their storage footprint to become more efficient. Now, the company can be extremely data-driven and monitor what is happening in their pipeline.
“This is what we need to do velocity-wise to stay ahead of the game.”
– Eddie Drake – Head of Technology at Marvel Studios
The PowerScale Advantage in Media and Entertainment
PowerScale storage has been field-proven in media workflows for over two decades and is the world’s most flexible,¹ efficient² and secure³ scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) solution. Known for its extreme performance and scalability, PowerScale can handle any requirements in media and entertainment, including high-resolution asset creation and accelerated rendering.
What’s more, the underlying OneFS filesystem helps with data management in several different ways, including data orchestration, mobility, security and quality of service. Take advantage of seamless data transfer and native replication across environments. And seamlessly monitor quality of service with read and write latency, IOPS and many other metrics in real-time.
Demanding workloads in media and entertainment require the performance and scale to support a global storage footprint like Marvel’s. We’re excited to partner with Marvel Studios to continue to bring award-winning movies to the big screen.
For more information on PowerScale for Media and Entertainment, visit this link.
1 Based on internal analysis of publicly available information sources, February 2023.
2 Based on Dell analysis comparing efficiency-related features: data reduction, storage capacity, data protection, hardware, space, lifecycle management efficiency, and ENERGY STAR certified configurations, June 2023.
3 Based on Dell analysis comparing cybersecurity software capabilities offered for Dell PowerScale versus competitive products, September 2022.
