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LA Media Production Agency, Create Advertising, Cuts Archive Costs in Half with Wasabi

Movie and media production company, Create Advertising, archives 1.5 PB with instant retrieval, no egress fees, and pricing that beats competitors.

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Half the cost, same throughput speed with Wasabi. We couldn't ask for anything more.

— Steve Schott, Director of Technology – Create Advertising

Overview

Create Advertising is a Los Angeles-based agency that creates trailers for movies, TV shows, and video games with major studios like Disney, Sony, and Netflix. With 1.5 PB of completed projects archived in the cloud and growing by hundreds of terabytes annually, the agency needed more affordable storage with instant access. Wasabi delivered both with pricing that undercut the nearest competitor.

INDUSTRY:
Media & Entertainment Marketing

USE CASE:

  • Active archiving

Challenges

Create Advertising uses Qumulo storage on-premises for its highest-performance storage, and previously cycled through several cloud vendors for off-premises archiving. With Backblaze, IT had to purchase an extra petabyte of storage before it was truly needed, and with AWS, data retrieval - which was occasionally requested by clients for new or updated projects - could take up to 12 hours. The agency needed a solution that balanced cost, instant access, and flexibility as archive storage needs continued to grow.

Cloud costs too high

The agency wanted to save money on cloud storage used for long-term archiving.

Lack of flexibility in storage planning

IT needed cloud storage that could scale when needed, without having to overbuy up-front.

Slow or expensive data retrieval

When the agency needed to retrieve archival footage, it took too long or incurred excessive fees.

I've used Wasabi personally for a long time and I've loved the service. But to be able to have simple billing with all-hot storage at a super reasonable price, that's what made Wasabi the most attractive to us.

— Steve Schott, Director of Technology – Create Advertising

steve-schott

Wasabi enables us to respond to our clients’ needs quicker. Due to the fast-paced nature of our industry, we often get very urgent requests from our studio clients to retrieve old projects from archive, and being able to tell them we’ll get the data over to them in 30 minutes instead of tomorrow is definitely paramount.

— Steve Schott, Director of Technology – Create Advertising

steve-schott

Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager was definitely worth it. Wasabi facilitated that transfer for us and it was incredibly fast. We were able to saturate multiple 10 gig connections, and we got the data migrated in about 10 days.

— Steve Schott, Director of Technology – Create Advertising

steve-schott

Solution

When Wasabi competitively matched another cloud vendor’s offering, IT chose Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. The agency purchased 1.5 PB of Reserved Capacity Storage as well as the Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager service to easily migrate its archival data to the Wasabi cloud.

  • Low pricing for hot storage service – IT was happy with the cost savings for Wasabi’s all-hot storage.

  • No egress fees – No fees meant accessing archival data wouldn’t bump up costs.

  • Easy data retrieval – Even though the data stored in Wasabi was archival, it could be accessed quickly whenever clients needed it.

  • Simple migration process – Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager made moving data to Wasabi smooth and fast and hands-off.

Results

With the Wasabi cloud for its long-term data archives, Create Advertising now has hot storage access at cold storage cost. With typical data uploads of 100 to 300 TB, the agency is pleased with Wasabi’s performance and is now considering storing additional backup use cases in Wasabi in the near future.

Media

  • Time and money saved on migration – Wasabi provided a seamless migration service, and migration was completed in about 10 days.

  • Improved client experience – Retrieving archived data is 24x faster with Wasabi, compared to AWS.

  • More efficient uploads and downloads – A recent upload test showed 307 MB/s over direct internet access and downloads are so fast that IT’s timing tool couldn’t measure them.

  • Growth with confidence – With Wasabi, IT knows it can scale capacity as needed and keep storage costs predictable.

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