Solution Summary VTrak A-Class Helps Students Work Together & Be Creative

About School of Visual ArtsSchool of Visual Arts has been a leader in the education of artists, designers and creative professionals for more than six decades. With a faculty of distinguished working professionals, dynamic curriculum and an emphasis on critical thinking, SVA is a catalyst for innovation and social responsibility. Comprised of more than 6,000 students at its Manhattan campus and 35,000 alumni in 100 countries, SVA also represents one of the most influential artistic communities in the world. Central to the College’s mission of educating future generations of creative leaders is providing its students with cutting-edge technology, like the PROMISE VTrak A-Class shared SAN solution deployed in its Apple Final Cut Pro Lab.

SAN Solution for Apple Final Cut Pro XAll of the Final Cut Pro X editing features are taught to SVA film and video students, including compositing, titles, motion graphics capabilities, editing techniques and digital special effects. To take advantage of these capabilities, the BFA Film and Video Department required a scalable, turnkey SAN solution that was not complicated to set up and administer and that worked well with Final Cut Pro. Having previously deployed the PROMISE VTrak x10 Series in this lab, the department knew that Final Cut Pro worked well with PROMISE’s storage solutions, so they turned to PROMISE Technology and the VTrak A-Class shared SAN storage solution.

Shared Storage for Collaborative WorkflowsFor the BFA Film and Video Department’s Final Cut Pro Lab, the VTrak A-Class addressed a

At A Glance• School of Visual Arts is one of the

finest art and design colleges in the U.S.

• Required a shared SAN storage solution for its Final Cut Pro lab in the BFA Film and Video Department to provide a high performance environment for 4K and 5K video workflows

• A real need for collaborative editing and the ability to reduce time spent on importing, editing and exporting, providing students with more time to focus on being creative

The PROMISE Solution• SVA deployed the VTrak A-Class

shared SAN storage appliance

Benefits• Supports Final Cut Pro X and is

optimized for both scalability and performance

• Ideal for collaborative editing, key to the workflow requirements at SVA

• Highly tuned performance and bandwidth for 5K ingesting, editing, and distributing

• Drastically reduces wait times for importing, editing, media management and exporting

• Allows for personal ‘digital lockers,’ to reduce students’ chance of losing work on portable drives

Case Study:VTrak A-Class

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School of Visual Arts

A look at the Final Cut Pro Lab at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, New York

chronic lack of shared storage by providing them with 65TB of usable capacity for the 19 student workstations connected to Fibre Channel switches and the VTrak A-class (Figure 1). The lab uses the VTrak A-Class SAN as the storage solution for the films made each year as part of the fourth-year thesis projects, providing each student with a personal ‘digital locker’ work space for her or his project.

Collaboration for each student film project is key. BFA Film and Video students do not work by themselves in class or at home, but instead sit, work and learn together, looking to their peers for advice and bouncing ideas off each other. “As more students choose ‘mobility’ over performance and reliability, this affects the quality of the work,” said Kamil Dobrowolski, BFA Film and Video faculty member and Final Cut Pro systems administrator. “As an instructor, I want to bring back performance, reliability and, most of all, collaboration.” The VTrak A-Class is a key part of this vision, as it enables collaborative workflows and allows more time for the editor to focus on the story, as opposed to technical hurdles and shortcomings.

Storage for Data Intensive 4K+ EnvironmentsWith the industry moving towards HD, 4K+ and RAW workflows, the BFA Film and Video Department purchased RED Epic 5K cameras and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Cameras to provide an environment with industry-standard resources that will help prepare the students for their careers. These cameras produce very large files at high data rates, and their use has highlighted a problem with the way storage had previously been managed.

Before SVA deployed the VTrak A-Class, BFA Film and Video students would provide their own personal storage device to use with the Mac Pros in the editing labs or their personal computers at home. These devices were typically a 1TB drive with USB 2.0 or FireWire interfaces, and while these solutions were usable for compressed lower resolution files they would not meet the demands of 5K workflows or support the playback of RAW footage from their new cameras. With the VTrak A-Class, storage is no longer the Achilles heel of post-production work, as the Fibre Channel solution delivers highly tuned performance and bandwidth for 5K ingesting, editing and distribution. Students are now not only able to capture 5K footage, they can more easily edit the content as well.

“As more students choose ‘mobility’ over performance and reliability, this affects the quality of the work. As an instructor, I want to bring back performance, reliability and most of all collaboration.”

Learn More About:School of Visual Arts• Founded in 1947 as Cartoonists

and Illustrators School

• More than 4,000 students enrolled in 32 undergraduate and graduate programs

• Faculty comprised of working professionals

• Alumni include filmmakers Lynn Shelton and Bryan Singer, fine artists Elizabeth Peyton and Sarah Sze, Academy Award winning composer Michael Giacchino, comic book artist Steve Ditko (The Amazing Spider-Man), animator Bill Plympton and many more

The Reseller Chimes In: “We were very pleased to be able to help implement this solution for SVA and PROMISE in a mixed San environment. SVA needed the VTrak A-Class to work collaboratively with their existing Xsan infrastructure and volumes. We were able to effectively and efficiently add the VTrak A-Class and allow SVA to utilize it in their current workflow, seamlessly giving them multiple volumes with integrated quotas to manage their user environment. We look forward to PROMISE’s planned updates to the VTrak A-Class that will allow SVA - and future clients - to achieve an even greater performance boost in the near future.”Mario Washington, CEO, Reboot Computer Services Inc.

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Figure 1: SVA’s Final Cut Pro Lab Configuration

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“Sure, students can carry their own portable drives for compressed lower resolution files - but each student buying storage for editing raw 5K footage on their own is very costly,” said Dobrowolski. “They would be crippled by it. Essentially, they would be able to shoot in 4K or 5K, but not be able to actually edit and deliver in the same resolution they started out in. The VTrak A-Class easily solves this problem.”

Storage for All StudentsWith the easy expandability of the VTrak A-Class solution, it can provide petabytes of storage, enough for all students in the BFA Film and Video Department, greatly diminishing the risks associated with portable drives. “Portable drives often get lost or damaged,” Dobrowolski said. “When this happens to students, it can be devastating. That problem is now solved because the VTrak A-Class allows for personal ‘digital lockers.’ Plus, PROMISE is well known for its RAID protection, so it’s a great benefit to know the students work won’t be lost, and that storage needs can always be expanded as demand grows.”

Less Waiting, More Time to Be CreativeTime is of the essence for producers, and that holds true for students at SVA. By dramatically reducing the time it takes to import, edit and export their projects, the VTrak A-Class and Final Cut Pro enable the students to have more time to focus on new ideas. “While it might take a week to manually sync 500 clips of video with 500 audio files by hand in another NLE, Final Cut Pro X can sync up in less than 10 minutes with Sync-N-Link,” Dobrowolski said. “VTrak A-Class supports Final Cut Pro X and as a scale out SAN is optimized for both scalability and performance for video editing.”

The VTrak A-Class provides great flexibility for the administrator when compared to competing solutions; the BFA Film and Video Department can allocate space to students as needed, and can make changes to match the needs of projects that tend to be fluid and ever-evolving.

The department has been very happy with the VTrak A-Class SAN performance, as it is significantly faster than the portable FireWire drives the students had been using. To transfer a 1TB project off of a FireWire device, the most common type used by SVA

With the VTrak A-Class, storage is no longer the Achilles heel of post-production work, as the Fibre Channel solution delivers highly tuned performance and bandwidth for 5K ingesting, editing and distribution.

Learn More About:VTrak A-Class• Shared scale out SAN filesystem

storage appliance

• Optimized for rich media applications

• SAN in a Box- single 4U box for RAID storage & metadata controllers and switch (switch not needed for up to 4 clients)

• Simple to set up and manage

• 50% less cost, 30-40% space and power savings

• Supports Mac OS, Windows, Linux clients

• Fast - 5.5GB/s Read and 2.4GB/s Write, per node (8 nodes)

• Scalable – Modular, scales up to 7PB Data, 1B files, 1000s clients, 8 nodes, 8 file systems

Learn more: www.promise.com/VTrakA-Class

VTrak A-ClassEmpowering Creativity

The VTrak A-Class & VTrak x10 deployed by SVA

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students, could take eight hours, but the VTrak A-Class is more than five times faster at importing, rendering and exporting those projects.

With the introduction of the new Mac Pro and Thunderbolt™ 2, the revolutionary technology from Intel® that allows blazing speeds of 20Gbps, the standard will be set for delivering exceptional performance for creative workflows and 4K environments. The key to the evolution of the BFA Film and Video Department’s Final Cut Pro lab will be the PROMISE SANLink2, a Thunderbolt 2 to 8Gb Fibre Channel bridge, which provides connectivity to the PROMISE VTrak A-Class shared SAN solutions and VTrak storage systems. The performance of their new environment will be double with the 8G SANLink2, which means less waiting and more time to be creative.

“With the industry moving toward 4K+ higher resolutions and raw workflows, and 5K RED EPIC and Black Magic Pocket Cinema cameras for raw footage ingest, the School of Visual Arts enables students access to bleeding edge technologies—and looks forward to creating a shared storage solution with the upcoming Mac Pro and PROMISE Thunderbolt 2 products and the current PROMISE VTrak A-Class shared storage solution,” Dobrowolski said. “We are very happy with the PROMISE VTrak A-Class as a ‘turnkey’ solution that gives students access to personal ‘digital lockers,’ so they don’t have to keep buying their own storage to keep up with raw footage demands, which can be extremely costly. Being able to adjust permissions according to the ever-changing needs of the thesis projects has proven to be an asset to drastically reduce wait times for importing, editing and exporting, allowing more time for our students to focus on being more creative and collaborating with each other in a classroom setting, rather than independently doing projects at home.”

To learn more about SVA and its innovative programs, please visit www.sva.edu.

“We are very happy with the PROMISE VTrak A-Class as a ‘turnkey’ solution that gives students access to personal ‘digital lockers,’ so they don’t have to keep buying their own storage to keep up with raw footage demands, which can be extremely costly.”

©2013 PROMISE Technology, Inc. All Rights Reserved. PROMISE, the PROMISE logo, VTrak, SmartStor, SuperTrak, FastTrak, VessRAID, Vess, PerfectPATH, PerfectRAID, SATA150, ULTRA133 VTrak S3000, BackTrak, HyperCache, HyperCache-R, HyperCache-W, DeltaScan, GreenRAID, Pegasus and SANLink are registered or pending trademarks of PROMISE Technology, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Information regarding products, services and offerings may be superseded by subsequent documents and are subject to change without notice. Thunderbolt and the Thunderbolt logo are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Learn More About:PROMISE Technology• Leading developer of high-

performance storage solutions for the media and entertainment market

• World’s first company to announce storage solutions with Thunderbolt™ 2 technology - Pegasus2 and SANLink2

• VTrak x30 Series and VTrak A-Class address needs of high-availability post-production and broadcast workflows

• Over its 25-year history, PROMISE’s RAID technology has been deployed more than 16 million times

• PROMISE Technology was founded in San Jose and has offices in Taiwan, Japan, India and the Netherlands

Learn more: www.promise.com

Kamil Dobrowolski, SVA Faculty Member and FCP Systems Administrator, with Donald Lockyer, Regional Sales Manager at PROMISE Technology