And the Emmy Award Goes To…Dell EMC Isilon

Throughout history, some of the biggest names in Hollywood have taken home a prestigious Emmy® Award. Now, you can add Dell EMC Isilon to that list!

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences has honored Dell EMC Isilon with a Technology & Engineering Emmy®  Award for early development of HSM (hierarchical storage management) systems. This marks the first time that Dell Technologies has taken home this prestigious award.

Pioneering A Storage Solution for Broadcast Challenges

While speeches at awards shows can sometimes get a little lengthy, we only have one group to thank today: our customers. Although this award reflects pioneering work from our engineering team, it primarily speaks to the value Isilon provides our customers as well as our continued commitment to innovation.

Given the importance of this award, I wanted to reflect on what got us to this moment in Dell EMC Isilon’s history.

Back in the early 2000s, media and entertainment companies began to require large-scale shared storage to securely hold and work with proliferating media formats: server ingested serial digital interface (SDI), new digital camera formats, graphics pulls, editorial, transcodes and playout.

To address that challenge, Isilon (a standalone company at the time) pioneered a network-attached storage (NAS) solution that’s allowed our customers to easily grow exponentially and tier content according to the business value. Because of the simplicity of managing a single namespace and the TCO of tiering data, Isilon enabled broadcast engineers and studio system administrators, previously focused on data wrangling and storage administration, the freedom to focus on media applications, accelerating workflows and developing business differentiating services.

Tackling Today and Tomorrow’s Media and Entertainment Workflows

Since 2003, over 2000 global organizations including broadcasters, post and VFX houses across 82 countries have invested in Dell EMC Isilon’s scale-out architecture to drive innovation in media workflows.

In the last three years alone, our media and entertainment customers have deployed over 1.5 exabytes of Isilon storage for media workflows and that investment continues to grow as live, episodic and feature datasets continue their phenomenal growth.

Today, media companies face a new set of challenges as content creators and distributors must determine how to take advantage of new technologies, that accelerate and simplify the creation of high-quality content in new resolutions and formats, as well as new viewing experiences for consumers, across traditional and new content distribution platforms. While at the same time, existing content needs to be digitized, archived, and stored, with proper tagging, to ensure quick retrieval and monetization. As these new challenges emerge, old ones still endure, with media organizations continuing to be under pressure to increase production quality, all while keeping costs low, and creating high returns for their owners and investors.

The Foundation of Media Workflows

Dell EMC Isilon is a key member of the broader Dell Technologies media and entertainment solution portfolio. Dell’s Precision workstations and displays are designed to empower creatives, Virtualized and Cloud Enabled solutions with VMware allow media companies to consolidate, run, manage, connect, and protect all your applications, Dell Networking enabling engineering teams to significantly reduce costs and empower IP broadcast workflows, Dell EMC PowerEdge servers continue to be a foundation of render farm and media application infrastructure, Dell Boomi is simplifying application integration and automation, and so much more.

Over the years, many of our customers have received Emmy® Awards, recognizing their fantastic content and compelling visual effects, developed using Isilon storage at the core of their media production workflow. We’re grateful that we can now add our name to this list as well.

We look forward to receiving this award in April at the 2020 NAB Show in Las Vegas. Speaking of which, if you’ll be in Vegas this April 18-22, please stop by our booth to see firsthand how Dell Technologies media and entertainment solutions can help you simplify, accelerate and cloud-enable your workflows, plus you’ll be able to take a picture with the Emmy® Award and celebrate this honor with us!

About the Author: Thomas Burns

Thomas Burns, Dell EMC's Field CTO for Media & Entertainment, has previously re-engineered Technicolor's global file-based workflows, and developed HDR imaging solutions for episodic and feature post-production. He built a boutique VFX facility in Shanghai, and was the architect of the 77th fastest supercomputer worldwide for a 3D animated feature film. Prior to that, he designed and built Oxygen Media's (now NBC/Universal) storage and networking infrastructure in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market. He is a founding member of the StudioSysAdmins networking site, and began his career at Silicon Graphics, Inc., developing Maya animation software and managing digital disk recorder products.