Screenlife
About Screenlife
Seattle-based, premier game company Screenlife LLC is the world’s leading developer of DVD games including the number one selling DVD game worldwide, SceneIt?® The DVD Game™. Screenlife’s games incorporate familiar entertainment content from movies, television, sports and music. To deliver games based on hot pop-culture titles such as James Bond, “Friends”, American Idol, and Harry Potter, Screenlife partners with major film studios and other large entertainment concerns.
Data sprawl, data management, HD capture
Screenlife’s entertainment partners send data in a variety of formats including disk drives, tapes, and DVDs in a mixture of high-resolution uncompressed and compressed video. To support its daily intake of formats, Screenlife was using disparate pools of storage. Because data was split between discrete devices, users did not know where data was stored and often had to move data from one storage solution to the other. Data wrangling became a key occupation for Michael Shimkus, Screenlife’s IT Director.
In addition to dealing with the issues caused by separate storage pools, Shimkus also experienced data management problems. “We had a bunch of cheap, ancient disk arrays that kept filling up and failing and weren’t under warranty and they didn’t have any functionality to alert anyone they were going to fail,” says Shimkus, “and we were working on high-definition (HD) projects that needed a lot more storage space.”
Data sprawl, data management problems, and the need for real-time HD capture were the challenges that drove Screenlife to seek an enterprise-class solution for their world-class storage requirements.
Isilon Scale-out NAS: A simple, yet elegant solution
After inviting several vendors to present solutions, Screenlife selected Isilon Systems and DZ Solutions to help achieve their storage and real-time capture goals. What stood out for Shimkus about DZ Solutions and Isilon was that they offered one solution to two unique business problems. “They were able to improve bandwidth AND give us a place to store data,” says Shimkus.
“The idea was to give them the ability to design their storage around their business rather than their business around their storage,” explains DZ Solutions’ President and Founder, Tom Gilsenan.
DZ Solutions and Isilon installed five Isilon IQ 12,000x-series nodes, providing 60 terabytes (TB) of raw capacity at 70+ % utilization. This solution allowed Screenlife to ingest and playback HD video using 10 Gb/sec while simplifying system workflow and architecture.
Instead of installing an expensive new backup system, DZ Solutions repurposed the existing backup software Screenlife had, saving the company thousands on a new backup project.
Result: System stability, scalability, and HD capture
The time between proof-of-concept and deployment was under 30 days.
As a result of the new system’s storage capabilities, Shimkus’ workload is half of what it used to be, “I don’t have to be constantly running around to replace disk drives and doing maintenance on old disk arrays,” says Shimkus.
DZ Solutions and Isilon were successful at delivering system stability, scalability, and HD capture at a competitive price.
“The others would have had to do those things at extra cost, extra hassle,” said Shimkus. “Also, if we need more capacity, we can do it on the fly—it’s good to know we can do that.”