Simplifying Media & Entertainment Workflows with Resilio and QuantaStor

By Lauren Grob on May 25, 2022 • ( 0 )

Workflows in the Media & Entertainment (M&E) industry are all about collaboration. With globally distributed teams of artists, editors, producers, and developers it can be difficult to keep teams and data in sync. Offices and data centers used by M&E organizations are often globally distributed across different continents and this adds to the complexity of keeping everyone current with the latest content, edits, and changes.

Global File Synchronization

To address the need for data synchronization in M&E, software is needed that can quickly and efficiently copy files between sites in real-time. Whereas there are tools like Robocopy and rsync that can be scripted to copy files, these tools are not as fast, they’re not real-time in how they copy, and they can quickly become complex to maintain as they require custom scripting to configure and operate.

In contrast, Resilio was designed for real-time multi-site collaboration so that IT teams can securely, efficiently, and easily move data between systems across sites. Resilio’s agent installs onto the servers and workstations that files need to be transferred and synchronized between. Once installed, all the data movement is easily set up by creating “jobs” via Resilio’s web based management and control system called Resilio Connect.

Resilio data transfer jobs can be configured for file synchronization, file distribution, and file aggregation to a centralized site and it also works with cloud object storage like Amazon S3. Resilio is an on-premises solution, with end-to-end data encryption. The transfer is UDP-optimized and supports up to 10 Gbps transfer speed even over high-latency connections.

QuantaStor’s Remote Replication

The QuantaStor software-defined storage platform already has remote-replication capabilities so one might ask, when should I use that versus using Resilio to replicate my data?

QuantaStor’s replication system is designed for DR failover and is ideal for periodic replication (eg, every 5 minutes) of file and block storage that is being used for VMs and databases as the transfers are all block-level-incremental. This means only the changes/deltas are transferred from one site to another and QuantaStor’s Remote Replication Schedules can replicate both Network Shares (file storage) and Storage Volumes (block storage). But QuantaStor’s replication system doesn’t do bidirectional data synchronization and it’s not real-time.

Resilio + QuantaStor

With Resilio, as soon as a user creates or modifies a file the changes are sent immediately. This is extremely important when developing content as it enables distributed organizations to collaborate across sites and locations in real-time and they’re able to make changes in all their locations and have them be kept in sync automatically.

With the release of QuantaStor 5.12, you can now add your QuantaStor system directly into Resilio Connect for easy data movement between your QuantaStor NAS storage and other systems with the Resilio agent installed like servers, workstations, and even other QuantaStor NAS systems.

Setup Process

Step 1: Login to Resilio Connect and add a new Agent, in this step you’ll be downloading a sync.conf file to put into a QuantaStor service configuration. On the second page click the “Download” button and then click “Finish”.

Step 2: Login to one of your QuantaStor systems, then select the Multi-tenancy tab. Select the Services section and choose “Create Resilio Config” from the toolbar. Now click “Browse” and select the sync.conf file downloaded in the previous step. You can name the service configuration anything you like, in this example it’s been named for the pool from which will be selecting Network Shares to present out via Resilio.

Step 3: Create a Resource Group in the Resource Group section, in this example we’re using “design_team_emea” as the resource group name. On the second tab associate it with the Service Configuration created in Step 2. Last, you’ll note on the first tab an option for Storage Pool Scope. If you have a Highly-Available Storage Pool setup, you’ll need to select it in that section. HA Storage Pools can move between systems and the internal Resilio Agent associated with the pool moves with the pool so that your Resilio access to the files is also made highly-available.

Step 4: Last, right-click on the Resource Group created in Step 3, and choose “Add/Remove Network Shares” from the menu. Now select one or more Network Shares to be presented out to via Resilio. Quantastor only presents the selected Network Shares to the Resilio Agent. This provides an additional layer of security so that Resilio users do not access all the Network Shares within your QuantaStor Storage grid.

Summary

These four simple steps are all it takes to connect your QuantaStor systems into Resilio Connect. After that you’ll control the synchronization of files between systems through Resilio Connect by creating one or more Jobs. Hope you enjoyed this article and if you have any questions please contact us at info@osnexus.com. You can also check out this Resilio blog post on the integration.