IMT Completes Shared Storage Workflow for Nomad

Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) has completed a new 120TB SAN storage system and expanded fiber networking for LA’s Nomad Editing Company.  The project was designed specifically by IMT to satisfy the considerable needs of a high volume, editorial, sound, and graphics services company that caters to major television commercials, advertising, and feature films.

At the heart of the Nomad installation is Quantum’s StorNext filesystem, ActiveRAID ES Storage, and QLogic Fibre Switches serving as a primary tier #1 storage feeding multiple Final Cut Pro on Mac and Autodesk Smoke on Linux workstations.

“IMT works differently than other vendors who just sell products,” explained Scott Carleton, VP at Nomad, whose clients include Pepsi, Visa, TD Bank, Chevy, Nike, Hyundai, Proctor & Gamble, Apple, and Gillette.  “IMT talks to you about your workflow, how you need to work today, and how you would like to work in the future. They partner with you from the business side and the workflow side, but they concentrate on the workflow first and engineer a complete system from there. Their team came in and did a thorough evaluation of our needs and came up with a well thought out redesign of our facility.”

“Growth at Nomad has been tremendous,” explained IMT’s EVP of Broadcast Chan Mahon, “and they were facing considerable networking and data storage limitations. Rather than further pushing their existing setup, we suggested an entirely new scalable system that can grow incrementally as Nomad grows. The results were so compelling that they suggested it to one of their key clients who also needed a major upgrade and they opted for a similar system design. Now that Nomad and their key client are on the same platform, there is much greater interoperability between the two for real-time daily activities.”

Carleton added, “The fact that we are using the same systems and talking the same language means that we can bounce things back and forth between the support teams and the IT staff.  We now have two separate teams working on the same projects, but sharing media more efficiently. In a sense it ties us that much closer, because we are not working on separate islands.”

As the leading Quantum StorNext systems integrator for media and entertainment, IMT acts as both a technology and business partner with clients.

“We have a strategic relationship with both Quantum’s software and tape hardware business units that allows IMT to provide solutions that are highly optimized for performance,” said Jason Kranitz, VP/Sales at IMT.  “The combination of the StorNext Filesystem with Active Storage is an unbeatable solution for big data requirements.”

IMT built and configured the Quantum StorNext SAN that is the central shared storage pool used for all post production HD and SD Workflows at the Nomad editing facility in Santa Monica, CA (additional offices are in New York and London). The foundation of the Nomad SAN is StorNext Metadata Controllers with ActiveRAID ES Storage Systems and Qlogic Fibre Channel Switches.  IMT Professional Services were contracted by Nomad to provide workflow consulting, project management, implementation, training, documentation, and ongoing 24/7 support.