Orchestrated Media as a Service: A Hybrid Cloud Solution powered by IMT-SoDA, Levels Beyond, and AWS

One of the most powerful things about AWS is its ability to provide a common service foundation for technology partners in the AWS Partner Network to work together to help customers meet their objectives. Integrated Media Technologies, Inc. (IMT) and Levels Beyond recently proved this point in their combined solution for the Los Angeles Chargers.

The Chargers are an American professional football team based in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league’s American Football Conference West division. The Chargers have a rich content archive dating back to 1961 and have 14 division championships in their history.

The Chargers organization relies heavily on video content captured from games, practices, and interviews from its 60-year historical archive for sponsorships, fan engagement, and community outreach. As the Chargers began to adopt 4K and 8K video content, their legacy storage infrastructure could not support the necessary performance and petabyte-scale requirements. The team needed a simple and cost-effective way to migrate off their legacy archive system, which was unsearchable and offline, resulting in minimal access to content.

The Chargers wanted to improve the performance and cost controls of their legacy on-premises storage architecture. They were looking for a hybrid cloud solution that could offer better content management, performance, real-time cost analytics, and budget controls. IMT came to the table suggesting SoDA, a data migration, and management solution, along with Reach Engine by Levels Beyond for media asset management (MAM) and workflow orchestration between on-premises and AWS. This solution provided the optimal outcome for the Chargers.

IMT launched SoDA as the first data mover of its kind that predicts the cost and speed of data transfer to and from the cloud, saving time and money. SoDA is designed to orchestrate storage from on-premises to the cloud, defining storage policies based on data insights and cost metrics. SoDA automatically monitors and tracks every job, generating on-demand reporting for departmental chargebacks and client billing. SoDA data management software puts customers in control of their budget by providing the insights necessary to make smart storage decisions. IMT’s SoDA allowed the Chargers to tackle their production storage and cloud migration objectives. The integration with AWS storage services and Reach Engine by Levels Beyond allows for their 4K and 8K content to be archived and managed online.

“We were concerned about data migration from multiple legacy NAS storage systems into a hybrid cloud model, says Jason Lavine, Head of Production at the Los Angeles Chargers. “SoDA made our migration easy. SoDA also connected into our Media Asset Management environment to enable our long-term preservation and archive workflows.”

In coordination with the robust Reach Engine solution for workflow orchestration, the hybrid deployment enables remote ingest from the field as well as facilitates collaboration with members outside of the Chargers organization. This is all made possible by leveraging the AWS Cloud, simplifying the speed, scale, and efficiency with which content creators and distributors fulfill edit pipelines, engage audiences, and monetize assets.

IMT, which has a strong track record for building successful hybrid and public cloud digital media solutions, took charge of the installation and had SoDA implemented and configured in minutes, enabling content migration from the legacy system to a new high-performance Storage Area Network (SAN). IMT leveraged API integration with the Reach Engine MAM to enable visibility and management of the Chargers’ archive. SoDA provides automated policy-based data movement from on-premises to AWS cloud storage and manages the movement between Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) object storage to Amazon S3 Glacier storage services. Amazon S3 is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. SoDA’s dry run feature provided insights into cloud storage and retrieval costs by leveraging the customers price book directly from AWS to ensure they understand the true costs of retrieving content from the cloud. SoDA also calculates the retrieval rate associated with pulling content from AWS storage tiers and provides this information to the user so they can plan accordingly.

The Chargers’ historical archive is now searchable and available, providing an improved user experience for managing content. IMT’s automated migration via SoDA reduced required IT resources, saving both time and cost by leveraging AWS for elastic services and long-term storage. The real-time cost analytics to regulate cloud spend ensure the Chargers are in control of their archive economics using a solution that solves today’s challenges and is built for the future.

To read the full LA Chargers case study and learn more about IMT’s software product SoDA, visit https://cloudsoda.io/.