Having expanded from two small offices to a new large office, Young Hollywood simultaneously consolidated its workflow environment with the installation of GraniteSTOR ST-RAID II, a cost-effective and easy-to-install shared storage solution from Small Tree. For the online celebrity content provider, working with clients such as Google, Yahoo, Unilever, AT&T, FOX, Samsung, Coca-Cola, and AOL, the shift to Small Tree technology was made in concert with the organization's efforts to improve efficiency in the face of increased production and archival demands.
In April 2010, Young Hollywood formed a strategic partnership with the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills to build a high-definition broadcast studio within the hotel property, from where it conducts scheduled celebrity interviews on a daily basis. The workspace also includes four connected hotel suites that have been converted into a fully functional lounge space, green room, and editing facility featuring six on-line bays and several graphics stations. According to Richard Charney, Young Hollywood's production manager, the company's post-production lab has packed a lot of infrastructure into a little space.
"Space is a critical issue at our office so we needed to make decisions regarding technology that would not only optimize our work efficiency, but space limitations as well," said Charney. "Our editors are far more efficient working off the Small Tree shared storage equipment and we no longer have several RAID drives with a chaotic flow of wires taking up precious space."
In January 2012, Young Hollywood teamed up with Google for their channel initiative to launch "The Young Hollywood Network" (YHN) on YouTube. With an extensive library of celebrity content already in hand - probably 40 to 50 TBs of material - and the YouTube channel initiative gearing up, Young Hollywood needed a robust storage solution that could handle the editing team's existing daily projects while taking into consideration the company's future growth expectations. As a result, ST-RAID II's scalability was an extremely attractive selling point to Charney.
"As we grow and continue to look for ways to maximize our space, our money is better spent on expanding local storage in terms of having our library accessible to all of our editors," Charney noted. "To that end, Small Tree's ST-RAID II offers tremendous scalability to meet the future workflow needs our editors will require without negatively impacting our physical space."
ST-RAID II is an Ethernet-based shared storage system supporting 6Gb SAS/SATA protocol end-to-end. Small Tree's ST-RAID II includes direct attached shared storage technology designed specifically for post-production professionals looking for economical, functional and easy to manage storage solutions.
Featuring transfer rates capable of supporting 44 streams of Pro Res 422 HQ with transfer rates up to 1 GB/s and 96TB, the ST-RAID II's low latency ensures there are no dropped frames in SD or HD. Available in 8-, 12- or 16-drive (2 or 3TB drive) configurations, ST-RAID II produces higher video stream counts and storage capacity.
For more information about Small Tree and its shared storage and networking products, visit www.small-tree.com or follow Small Tree on Twitter @SmallTreeComm.
