Case Study
Hybrid Cloud Solution Cuts Video Production Management Costs by 80%
Overview
The Japanese animation production studio, khara, inc. is best known for the Evangelion anime film series, but the studio produces work across the motion picture industry, including television, live action films, and video games. With a vision of creating titles that will reach into the future, khara, inc. houses several production sites that all need access to their data archives.
Storing a comprehensive library of digital assets since the studio was founded in 2006—now more than 500TB—on-premises became a challenge, so khara studio implemented a hybrid cloud archiving solution with Wasabi and QNAP NAS.
The Challenge
Storing essential files exclusively on-premises exposes data to hardware issues and increases the risk of data loss. khara studio’s multiple production sites relied on leased lines to access their data, which increased costs as data was accessed. With more than 60 hard disk drives, the network-attached storage solution khara studio originally had was prone to failure, despite their RAID 5 redundant configuration. Multiple disks would fail in succession, adding continual repair and replacement work to the operations and management team’s plate, which prevented them from addressing other system needs.
"We would replace hard discs that broke down, but repeated failures increased the risk of losing irreplaceable data and the fear of this happening kept us awake at night."
The large amount of data in each hard disk made replacement a nerve-wracking chore. Replacing and rebuilding data on a single hard disk would often take one or two weeks. Each rebuild would lower NAS performance and make it hard for in-house staff to work efficiently.
An on-premises system also requires that hardware be replaced at the end of each maintenance agreement cycle. A complete migration upon renewal may take as long as 6 months. Facing another renewal, the team at khara studio began the search for a solution that would free them from being stuck in an endless loop of renewals and replacements.
"Our new solution increases scalability for our studio and is likely to reduce operating and management costs by 80%. We can focus on other priorities now instead of frequent physical hard drive failures and data administration headaches.”
Chief System Engineer
khara, inc
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The Solution
A new hybrid cloud infrastructure for khara, inc. combined the power of Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, low-cost, high-speed data storage, with QNAP, a flexible and scalable network storage system on-premises.
“The low price, without transfer fees, and scalable capacity was what clinched the deal for us after we saw the cost estimate. The total cost of the solution was comparable to our existing on-premises system, which also made it easy to switch to Wasabi.”
The system is configured so that Wasabi hosts khara studio’s cloud object storage, while a 60 TB QNAP NAS and QNAP Application HybridMount are used to receive downloaded files. The entire archive is now stored in low-cost Wasabi with files downloaded to the QNAP as needed.
The new system has the following advantages:
Data could be archived in the same cost-controllable manner as before with predictable pricing from Wasabi.
QNAP NAS was a part of the existing system, so in-house users are familiar with the tool and can operate within the new system without having to learn anything new.
Because it is in the cloud, all of khara studio’s data is permanently free from hardware failure after migration.
HybridMount provides low-latency access to cloud storage by remotely mounting public cloud services and remote devices.
It was very easy to set it up. We confirmed that if the QNAP were to break, we would be able to easily replace it by hooking up another device, with no risk of data loss."
Kazuki Misawa, Chief System Engineer - khara, inc.
Results
The new system affords reliable performance equal to that of the previous on-premises system when tested repeatedly with transfers of 3D model files, which average about 5 GB in size.
Wasabi provides a reliable cloud solution that should lower our operations and management costs by 80% and frees us from the hardships associated with hardware operation and management."
Kazuki Misawa, Chief System Engineer - khara, inc.
Additionally, no change is required on the part of staff in accessing the files they need, so increased efficiency across khara studio’s production roles is expected.
The Wasabi and QNAP NAS solution protects khara, inc.’s invaluable production data, cuts operations and management costs, and enables scalability and creativity by putting the studio’s most important assets within just a click away on any internet connection.
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