IMT: Shaking Up The Cloud Data Management Market

The Customer

Company Size: 200+
Industry: Broadcast Media
Location: North Hollywood, CA

As a leader in media and IT technology and workflow solutions, Los Angeles-based Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) combines experience and expertise with its world-class engineering, sales, and consultancy teams.

The Challenge

With the global shift to cloud infrastructure, IMT has been building a greater focus on services and software, including Media Asset Management and software development specialties.

IMT identified a gap in the media and entertainment market by replacing traditional tape archives with cloud and cold storage solutions. Traditionally, a storage vendor would sell each storage tier to customers in this market alongside software to manage each dataset. Despite the rapid development of cloud-based storage solutions, there were no archive storage management technologies available that allowed organizations to move data between different tiers based on rules and policies whilst tracking associated costs.

It was this growing requirement in the media and entertainment marketplace that led to IMT’s development of the SoDA software solution. SoDA is a state-of-the-art enterprise software application designed to seamlessly manage and automate file movement in and out of the cloud and deliver actionable insight into the OPEX costs of storage and cloud services.

Its development is the culmination of IMT’s 13 years of experience designing, engineering, and building modern storage management systems for over 700 customers, including many Fortune 500 companies. By addressing the complexities of on-prem and multi-cloud storage environments, SoDA solves critical storage management problems making technical organizations accountable and efficient.

Deployed in the customer data center, SoDA is a managed software and required infrastructure that is highly available. The IMT team decided that running a Kubernetes cluster at the edge as a software target would deliver an effective and resilient infrastructure solution. There remained, however, the issue of persistent data which couldn’t be written locally owing to the risk of data loss in the event of node failure.

The Solution

Ease of
Deployment

Compared to other solutions, the processes required to deploy Ondat were less complex, as well as being much easier to maintain.

Performance &
Security

Ondat offered their team control of storage with no compromise on performance, availability, or security .

Rapid Failover &
Replication

Ondat delivers rapid failover, replication, in-memory
cache, and data reduction with access controls.

The Benefits

The initial production deployment of SoDA made use of IMT’s existing customer base with the integration of Media Asset Management solutions for targeted clients. This resulted in a customer content management role with brokered data movements to SoDA. “This allows us to provide customers with a cost breakdown of cloud cost by user based on who is using the application, instead of the application itself making a request to the cloud provider such as AWS, where they incur cost as a result”, said JD Trout, VP, Software Solutions at IMT.

On a broader level, IMT and their customers have benefited from cost, time, and resource savings over solutions that were used previously. “For us, Ondat delivers the perfect combination between performance and price,” he said. “Alternative open source solutions would have required us to allocate expensive technical resources to learn about the platform. That person then becomes the sole bottleneck of information, which is less than ideal and didn’t meet our requirements.”

“Ondat, however, has the support infrastructure in place where if there is a problem, I can draw on the deep product knowledge of their experts to put things right.” In addition, IMT points towards the

Ondat pricing model, offering the ability to scale cost effectively in a ‘pay as you grow’ structure. “Overall, Ondat are a joy to work with,” said JD Trout, VP, Software Solutions at IMT. “We have a storage solution we are confident in, and one of the most important points of all is that the company we are partnering with just ‘gets’ storage.”

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