Extending Avid's Unity With Archion's Synergy HDu

Philo Television, the post-production division of the marketing and direct-response production company Lieberman Productions, recently acquired an Archion Synergy HDu system to extend its existing Avid Unity MediaNetwork. StudioBytes asked CTO Evan Stewart for a little more detail about the technology.
StudioBytes: Talk a little about Philo. What’s a typical project like?
Evan Stewart: Philo Television is the post-production division of Lieberman Productions, the marketing and direct response production company behind many major brand successes, including Proactiv Solution, Sheer Cover, Cindy Crawford’s Meaningful Beauty and Heidi Klum’s In An Instant. Lieberman and Philo are owned by Guthy-Renker, one of the world’s largest direct response television companies, with annual sales of more than $1.5 billion. Philo creates shortform and longform direct response for broadcast. Our Facility handles the edit, color-correction, graphics creation, effects, scoring and audio finishing for everything we produce.

How about your hardware and software?
Philo has 18 Avid systems – two Symphony Nitris DX, one Media Composer Nitris DX, 12 Media Composer Adrenalines and 3 Media Composer Mojos, all on Mac. We also have two Unity 5.1 systems, with over 46 TB of storage on our larger, and 27 TB of storage on the smaller. We have seven Mac graphics workstations with Adobe Creative Suite, including After Effects Professional, and Maya 3D graphics.

You recently adopted Archion’s Synergy HDu system. How big had your Unity network grown, and why did you start looking for new options for expansion?
Our Unity was at 30 TB before we added the Archion HDus. Archion was a much cheaper storage option than adding more Avid Unity storage. Adding the storage made our system about one third bigger than before. We also liked the Archion because of the Raid 5.

What were your specs for storage? Did you have a performance benchmark you were looking to hit (in terms of numbers of clients connected, etc) as well as a capacity baseline?
We needed to be able to connect 18 clients at once with at least 6 of those clients reading Avid 1:1 SD simultaneously. We also need to have literally thousands of hours of footage online and accessible to all Unity clients.

Were there any hiccups in the installation process? Does the Unity system accept the Archion storage fully as one of its own?
The installation was a breeze. We simply set up the RAID according to Archion’s directions. Once attached to the Unity system via fiber, the Unity software saw the HDu’s drives and we were able to add to the Unity as an allocation group, and create storage workspaces as if it were Avid XT drive chassis.

Does the HDu offer different functionality or more efficiency compared to the Unity?
The Unity software allows drive sizes of up to 500 GB only. The Synergy has 16 750 GB drives and uses its built-in RAID 5 to create smaller virtual drives that Unity can handle. Because of the RAID 5 on the Archion HDu we do not have to activate Unity mirroring on the Archion arrays. This allows us to use the space for storing files rather than mirroring.

What’s your path look like for further expansion?
We are currently at max file count with plenty of headroom on our Unity system, so we have no need to expand the storage.