Marquis Broadcast Transforms Its Business With Hybrid Cloud Production

The company aims to decouple people and operations from infrastructure and technical complexity.

There's been a big shift in the industry recently, from media producers talking about the cloud to actually starting to use it. Suddenly, Marquis is being called upon to deploy solutions that directly integrate to cloud – whether private or public. Often this is around making the best of both cloud and traditional on-premise facilities, with hybrid workflows.

Over the last 12 months, Marquis Broadcast's strategy has been to enable and accelerate hybrid and pure play cloud production, to make possible new, more efficient workflows and transform productions. As of now, it has almost completed this transformation, with its major products now supporting S3 and cloud compute when appropriate, with Project Parking and Workspace Backup also adding SwiftStack and Azure support.

Importantly, Marquis is 100% agnostic in terms of cloud platform choice, so its S3 cloud enablement programme has included an intensive testing and validation programme with Amazon, Dell EMC, Caringo, Cloudian, and IBM. Not only does this allow its customers to take advantage of low cost, performance and scalability of cloud storage, they can do so with their preferred vendor. Marquis can also support hybrid storage environments, providing the best choice of traditional storage alongside on-premise and in-cloud environments.

As Chris Steele, Managing Director of Marquis Broadcast, explains: "What sets us apart is our large library of off-the-shelf legacy and contemporary industry integrations. This means that most customers will already have technology that we can easily support, enabling us to transform workflows quickly with the lowest risk."

"Probably the most valuable transformation is to decouple people and operations from infrastructure and technical complexity," adds Paul Glasgow, Marquis's Sales & Marketing Director. "This enables easy load-balancing of people and resources across geographies and time zones, making production workflows more efficient and effective."

The ever-increasing capacity of Avid® shared storage has completely transformed production processes, with faster networks, greater storage and more concurrent clients operating at ever-higher resolutions. This is where Marquis's Workspace Backup application can help; this powerful disaster recovery and business continuity solution now natively supports cloud storage. Designed specifically to protect Avid ISIS and NEXIS™ systems, Workspace Backup uses detailed analytics of Avid workspaces to ensure the highest levels of integrity of the backup, ensuring the most crucial projects can be immediately and individually recovered to production in any location that can see the backup, whether in cloud or tier two storage.

Workspace Sync provides a higher level of protection, intelligently syncing workspaces – perhaps every 30 minutes – to a second ISIS or NEXIS. This is ideal for intensive, fast turnaround, hard delivery deadline productions, such as nationwide talent shows, ensuring the maximum loss of work in progress is only 30 minutes. Both Workspace Sync and Workspace Backup can be used concurrently to provide the most useful combination of disaster recovery and business continuity. The licensing is also highly scalable, so a customer can choose which workspaces need the highest levels of protection. For example, a perpetual software license to fully and automatically protect a 16TB Workspace is only $2,250; a small investment to protect a business-critical workspace, especially one so valuable that it might be an uninsurable risk.

Project Parking has become the industry gold standard for Avid storage management analytics and project portability, with the system now featuring cloud support. This successful Avid ISIS and NEXIS application provides project analytics, visualisation, management and archiving, with its cloud support delivering a seamless multi-site Avid workflow ideal for film production and broadcast. Project Parking, Workspace Sync and Workspace Backup also work seamlessly together; one very large benefit is that using Project Parking analytics will prevent duplicate and orphaned media propagating into the Workspace Sync or Backup, saving significant amounts of storage whilst also accelerating time-critical sync backup and recovery processes. "Cloud support for Project Parking makes it simple to move complete Avid projects, together with all the bins, sequences and media files, to any other location worldwide," explains Chris Steele. "In fact, we're enabling the easiest transformation to hybrid cloud post production."

Medway has also become cloud-enabled, allowing the most advanced cloud/ground workflows with advanced UHD transcoding. Simon Fearn, Marquis Broadcast's Product Manager, explains the new benefits; "Medway uses partial file retrieval of cloud assets together with cloud compute ultra-advanced Avid project proxy relinking. This means anyone, anywhere, could upload content to the cloud, then have Medway deliver proxies to an Avid production environment. It's a very efficient system."

Marquis's strategy has been to transform itself and its technology, actively enabling and accelerating industry change. Uniquely, the company offers a path of lowest risk and easy migration to cloud, from individual producer creators to the very largest of media enterprises.

To find out more, please visit the Marquis Broadcast stand 7.G05 at IBC 2007 or visit www.marquisbroadcast.com.

Image: Paul Glasgow, Chris Steele and Simon Fearn, Marquis Broadcast.

(JP/MH)