Wise Buddah is a well-established name in the audio sector, specializing in radio program production, audio post-production facilities, talent management, jingles and station imaging. The company produces radio shows for BBC radio and global commercial stations, and counts international companies such as Universal, Warner Bros., Sony BMG, O2 and MTV as clients.
Approximately a year ago Wise Buddah recognized a requirement for a robust storage solution that would allow it to create an interim archive between working storage and back-up storage. The company also wanted to centralize its working data areas shared across five studios to provide more flexibility.
After extensive research, Wise Buddah decided to purchase a Studio Network Solutions globalSAN X-16 Ethernet-based SAN system with six SANmp seats.
“We chose SNS because it was the only cost-effective option that could achieve what we needed,” says Dave Holt, Technical Manager & Senior Engineer, Wise Buddah. “Running fiber cables through our building was not possible without structural changes and the iSCSI system provided the best solution, allowing us to move away from using multiple external drives. SNS also impressed us with the way they approached design features to best suit Pro Tools, and backed it up with practical industry knowledge.”
Wise Buddah has five studios and a transfer suite, each running Digidesign Pro Tools with a SANmp client on a Mac workstation. Each engineer has a small volume on the globalSAN X-16 that they use to work from, and a larger RAID 10 divided into archive volumes organized by client type. When jobs are finished they are copied from Eng drives to the archive. The archives are then auto synced and backed up to LTO3 every night.
The Studio Network Solutions system has been installed for approximately six months, and has already made a huge difference to the efficiency of Wise Buddah’s workflow. “It’s allowed us to do away with carrying drives around and creating lengthy network copies, and enables anyone to access any drive to retrieve files via the SANmp interface. Also, as everything is stored to RAID 10 it creates a safe archive storage area where we can have very fast access to jobs up to 12 months old before having to resort to tape backups.”
While the system is now used on all projects, the area where it has been most useful is on advertising projects. Before, keeping track of individual projects that need to be continually reversioned at short notice by multiple engineers was very difficult to manage, but these can now be accessed by anyone in any studio – which makes life much easier.
The Wise Buddah team is very happy with its new workflow, which Holt feels couldn’t have been achieved without the support from Studio Network Solutions. “The set-up we wanted hadn’t really been achieved before without using much more expensive equipment,” he states. “SNS spent a lot of time working out with me how it could be done and then how we could configure it to work best for our environment. After the installation the support guys were always on hand to help fine-tune it. Since then I haven’t really had to think about it as it’s all worked exactly as they said it would!”
Wise Buddah is now looking to the future, with the integration of Postmap planned, and will add to the current system as it expands.
Company: Wise Buddah
Working Environment: Pro Tools HD
About SNS
Studio Network Solutions (SNS) specializes in the development of shared storage hardware and software solutions for the Media and Entertainment industry. Since day one we’ve applied unmatched ingenuity and experience to create outstanding products that exceed industry expectations while providing outstanding support to our customers.
Our customers range in size from individual freelance engineers to multinational media powerhouses. Our solutions are used to produce everything from books on tape to full track scoring for major Hollywood films. Our products have been at the technical core of the music you listen to, the games you play, the shows you watch and the movies you see.
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