Case STUDY
Element Productions Case Study
Element Productions Builds Out with Facilis Shared Storage
In the heart of the vibrant Boston media community, one company stands out. A modern new facility with the best artists and workflow tools at their disposal, Element Productions (www.element.cc) produces compelling content in historic Back Bay under the shadow of the Hancock Tower.
With six to ten users on Mac workstations, connected through 10Gb Ethernet to the server, it was important to have a reliable and high-performance solution for their projects. Element moved from their initial Facilis system purchased in 2011 to a new 192TB HUB24.
“Element took advantage of the Facilis ‘Customer Loyalty Trade-in’ discount for the new system. They have been very happy with their existing system and were eager to utilize of some of the newer features/functionality.” Said Doug Hynes of Facilis reseller CIS Group, “The sales process was easy as the Element team knew what they wanted, but the timeline extended due to a new facility build-out, which was finally complete in June 2023.”
Element’s first system from 2011 was still in operation and working well but was unable to make use of all the new features and advancements that Facilis had made over the past several years.
“We needed more capacity for the increased size of content since we’re mostly dealing with hi-res footage now. The number of anticipated projects was also growing.” Explains Mike Nolan, Associate Post Producer at Element, “Our workflow requires having multiple editors and colorists working with same footage at same time. Also, since clients are present for editing sessions, having a solution that is networked with hardware out of the edit bay is important.”
Reliability is especially important for the Elements team, as their customers are on hard deadlines and downtime can affect the bottom line.
“Prior to being introduced to Facilis, we had a failure with a previous system that resulted in loss of data, which cost the company a lot, both financially and from a project perspective.” Nolan continues, “Since moving to Facilis, our system has been bullet-proof for over a decade. That was a welcome surprise and simply unheard-of in today’s fast-moving technology environment. It made the choice easy when we started planning for a replacement.”
Element plans to use many of the tools that Facilis offers on their HUB Shared Storage Servers, including Object LTO to replace an existing software backup solution, FastTracker Asset Management to easily search and process their assets, as well as control movement to LTO, and WANLink remote access features.
“We’d like to take advantage of Facilis WANLink feature to facilitate work from home capabilities for our staff. This will alleviate shipping drives around and dealing with two-hour round trip commute into the office.” comments Nolan, “We hope this will really improve the environment for our staff, give them work-from-home flexibility and improve efficiency in the timeline to get jobs out the door.”
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