New SwiftStack Director of Media Solutions Vince Auletta Details Why He Joined Company

Vince Auletta recently joined SwiftStack as Director of Media Solutions. To understand why he joined SwiftStack, Auletta has penned a blog post chronicling his career at a prominent post-production and distribution facility near Hollywood and why his team selected SwiftStack for its storage transformation project rather than another vendor. Check out some of Auletta’s post below and CLICK HERE to read the full pice on the SwiftStack Blog.

Filing cabinets filled with custom laser-cut foam and ~600 loose hard drives, DiskCatalogMaker, and BlacX docks — this ’shared storage’ and archive strategy was  introduction to petabyte-scale problems in the media industry.  But let me back up.

In late 2012, I joined an early-stage but now prominent post-production and distribution facility near Hollywood.  I was surprised by what I found but now know that it is relatively normal for young media companies.

There was no internal IT team, so technology decisions were lacking in the areas of reliability and sustainability.  Most technology was handled by contractors who weren’t necessarily operating with the company’s long-term interests in mind.

Luck would have it that the company’s founder had an open-door policy, and—after I expressed these concerns—he took a leap of faith and offered to let me start the internal IT team.  In hindsight, this probably had a lot more to do with cost than my abilities (or anything else), but I’m still extremely thankful for that opportunity and the road down which it sent me.

The following six years saw that team grow to eight people on two continents and saw our storage infrastructure transform from that ~600 disk sneakernet to 25PB of some of the most advanced tech in the media industry—with SwiftStack at the core.

To understand why I joined SwiftStack, it helps to understand why we selected SwiftStack for our storage transformation project rather than another vendor.

Read more at swiftstack.com/blog.