A Modern Digital Media Workflow and Offsite Performance

When Hogarth WorldWide designed their IT infastructure they had quite a few requirements for their archive, some of which were:

The archive should be alive; available to use and reuse the data, wherever you are located, and whenever you require it.

Solution: Disk-based archiving, online, strongly fire-walled.

The archive should be offsite; but the data must be completely under the control of Hogarth.

Solution: Co-hosting in an offsite data centre.

Access speed must be fast.

Solution: Be able to reach the target over a Gigabit link.

A scalable solution with discrete data partitions on a per customer basis.

Solution: MatrixStore provided that along with 256 bit access keys and encryption where required.

So all well and good: as you’d expect reading a blog on Object Matrix’s website, our solution fitted perfectly and they purchased.

Then the mud hit the fan – so to speak.

The solution installed perfectly and was up and running in no time, but there was a problem: speed.

Speed was down as low as 25MB/s during some file transfers, faster than many archive solutions (even disk other archive solutions) but still far lower than we’d have expected; so Hogarth turned to us for help, and even considered purchasing some expensive file transfer technologies. However, we quickly realised what the problem was: high network latency.

In most of the environments that we’d previously installed, the networks were either slow, in which case we’d filled bandwidth, or fast and low latency; in which case we’d filled bandwidth. What we hadn’t had to cope with was a network where acknowledges returned for each packet of data sent were delayed by a few nanoseconds. Multiplied by Gigabytes of data, that delay was killing our performance.

A solution was required.

Because the Object Matrix solution runs software at both the client and server “ends” of the solution, we are not dependent on a single transport protocol to use when transferring data. Therefore, without needing to change around the whole solution, we were able to create a protocol more suited to high-latency type connections. The result? Hogarth are now able to see their full (approx. 100MB/s) bandwidth filled, and are able to offer a superb archive facility with instant access to their customers.

At OM we feel it demonstrates the advantage of including an API which runs on the client and the server for secure, reliable transmission of data (saving the customer from having to purchase some other file transfer product/set up VPNs), and are pleased that we were able to release the solution to the customer within a few months of them raising the issue, and at no cost to them.

See also: About MatrixStore