Diving Horse Creations turns to high-bandwidth network to improve workflow.
Related Information
PDF Version
Arts Company Centralizes Storage to Streamline Video Production
February 16, 2010
Challenge
Diving Horse Creations (DHC), headquartered in the scenic Old Port of Montreal, is a private holding company operating in the art, music, and film industries. One DHC subsidiary, Phi Group, invests in music, film, architecture, design, and new media endeavours. Operating as a separate entity yet sharing administrative services with DHC, DHC/Art, Foundation for Contemporary Art, presents some of the most compelling art from around the world. The foundation provides a premiere venue for international, national, and local contemporary artists.
In recent years, Phi Group’s film productions have won major international acclaim, including a short film prize at the Cannes Film Festival. As a result of its success, the company has grown quickly. DHC and its subsidiaries are housed in three buildings located within a one-kilometre radius of one another.
Much of Phi group’s work involves editing large raw video files. Employees in any of DHC’s three principal buildings could be working on the same production, but the massive size of the files made sharing and transfers difficult, says Matthieu Locas, IT director at Diving Horse Creations (DHC).
“In the past, employees would load their work onto a portable hard drive and carry it from one building to another, or they’d send the file over the Internet, which would take hours,” he says. “Neither option was very efficient.”
Employees also had to work on the large video files directly on their local workstations.
“If they were rendering a movie file, they sometimes couldn’t touch their computer for hours,” Locas says.
Solution
DHC realized that it needed a solution to allow employees to share files more efficiently without slowing down local PCs. The firm turned to VisionIP a division of Allstream a Montreal-based technology solutions provider and Cisco Silver Certified partner, offering expert consulting, infrastructure, deployment, and support services to businesses of all sizes.
“VisionIP has a great reputation,” Locas says. “I had worked with them in the past and had nothing but good experiences. They were very professional and delivered on everything they promised.”
VisionIP worked with DHC to install a fibre-based network, originally designed by Locas. Different scenarios were proposed to DHC to connect its three principal buildings to one another as well as two storage area networks (SANs), housed in two of the buildings.
“We improved with DHC the high-bandwidth network with built-in redundancy that would make Diving Horse’s large video files much easier to handle and boost productivity,” says Alain Bouchard, vice president, finance and administration with VisionIP. “By centralizing the storage, the IT environment would also be much simpler to manage.”
The entire network would run at 10 gigabits-per-second all the way down to the desktop, allowing employees to share files more easily. If employees needed to work with large movie files, they could simply mount the files from one of the SANs to their local machine and run the file directly on the SAN’s high-speed servers.
VisionIP and DHC chose Cisco Catalyst® 3750 Switches to route traffic between the three buildings and Cisco Nexus® 5010 Switches to handle traffic between the SANs and clients.
“I have used a lot of Cisco equipment in the past, and it was always very reliable,” Locas says. “We knew we would get excellent performance and support.”
DHC’s network relies on two Cisco® Catalyst 3750 Switches at each of its three major sites to provide reliable, redundant network connectivity. The Nexus 5010 switches give users low-latency connections to the SANs.
Each SAN consists of multiple hard drives configured in RAID 0 to help ensure maximum throughput, which is important because DHC’s average daily data transfers exceed 10 terabytes.
Results
Since implementing its new network, DHC has simplified file sharing between employees at its three main buildings and improved the video production process by streaming multimedia content to and from any of the offices.
The firm can now back up and replicate data across its three sites to help ensure that important information or video footage is not lost. Finally, DHC has set up off-site archiving between the sites, giving the company better disaster recovery capability.
The new network has also simplified the work of DHC’s IT team.
“We don’t have to manage and coordinate three separate sites now,” Locas says. “Everything is tied together, and we can centralize much of our work and data management. The project has been a real success.”
