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Wondering what others are doing for their Marketing department’s storage needs. We have recently started doing video editing with lots of large video files. We’re out of network storage and the Marketing manager complains about Sharefile (our cloud storage) being too clunky and inefficient.

We’re looking at Egnyte, Open Assets, and Synced NASs between two offices but wondering if there are better solutions or approaches.

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We have a client company that does multi-media advertising. They are currently evaluating Egnyte, as they need to manage and work with assets from both in the office and on the road, so they want cloud storage. Backblaze B2 is cheaper than the AWS S3 storage, but B2 has an S3 compatible API, so seems pretty good. Might be a couple months before we hear from them though, as they are managing that in-house, not through us (MSP).

Open Assets looks nice, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it myself. I’d be interested in heard opinions on it though.

CatDV was another one they were looking at which is really built around digital video, so that might be worth a look as well.

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We added a separate, dedicated NAS just for the marketing group’s large files, and let them manage it.

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Thanks for sharing, I’ll look into B2. We are meeting with open asset and Egnyte soon and will share what we take away.

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We have a Dedicated Synology NAS in RAID 10 with about 40TB of usable space. Backup is on AWS, keeping 1 copy(It gets expensive). NAS has 10GB uplink, with the possibility of bonding two ports if we ever need to. Haven’t heard a complaint in the last 3 years from it.

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Video editing does not work with the cloud. No matter how fast it is, people will keep complaining.

The most inexpensive option is to get two NAS boxes like Synology packed with SSDs, which will utilize the 10 GbE network bandwidth and replicate/sync data between offices.

More demanding customers tend to purchase our two-node hyperconverged appliance https://www.starwindsoftware.com/hyperconverged-appliance-for-video packed with either SSD or NVMe and 40/100 GbE networking for ultimate performance. Mirroring between the hosts can be done in real-time if a cross-office network allows it, and a GPU also makes it possible to process video on the hosts (rendering, compression, and hardware-accelerated streaming). Exact hardware configuration is always thoroughly tailored to a specific use case, matching the customer’s needs and budget.

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There are quite good recommendations already by others, but I would recommend you consider using software RAID to enhance performance and redundancy. Solutions like xiRAID are optimized for handling sequential workloads, making them ideal for video editing and media production.

I would say setting up a high-performance NAS with RAID configurations can provide the speed and reliability needed for your marketing team’s video projects. Look into options that offer RAID5 or RAID6 setups for a balance of performance and data protection

you might find some useful insights in a blog I recently came across about high performance for media and entertainment workloads.

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UPDATE:
Because of our teams’ mobile needs and multiple locations, we decided to stick with our cloud file sharing platform (Citrix Sharefile), and just sync the necessary files for a given project. Egnyte is great, but had more features than we needed and is not unlimited storage like our ShareFile plan is. Open Assests is entirely cloud based with no local client, so not feasible to use for video editing projects.
Thanks for all the suggestions.