Integrated solution from Starline and Archiware accelerates MSM Studios' workflow

The spectrum of prominent productions that are processed and refined daily at the MSM Studios in Munich ranges from Sara Brightman and Herbert Grönemeyer to Peter Maffay, Gregory Porter, Marius Müller Westernhagen and Yellow, from Leonhard Bernstein to John Williams and Herbert von Karajan.

Whether DVDs, CDs or Bluerays, whether recording, post-production, editing, colorgrading or authoring, everything can and will be handled here at the highest level. Television stations, film and record companies, advertising agencies and corporations entrust their productions to MSM Studios. Numerous productions have already received awards such as the Echo, Opus or Grammy, and MSM itself has received the Innovation Award for Bluray Authoring.

MSM Studios

MSM Studios are frequently also pioneers and developers of new formats and solutions, such as PureAudio and Immersive Audio. As the first studio in Europe to be certified for Dolby Atmos Home, there are repeatedly reference and measurement tasks to work on.

One challenge is the technical precision required for this, the multitude of media formats and the necessary technical equipment. To fulfill these requirements, Stefan Bock, CEO of MSM found an effective solution.

"What was important to us now was a performance and capacity increase for video editing in 4K and higher, flexibility, archiving on LTO tape and very good service. The continuation of Archiware P5 was a prerequisite. We found all of this with Starline. In addition, Starline offers individual configurations of professional storage according to customer requirements. Comprehensive support up to 24/7 is also important in our production environment."

– Stefan Bock, CEO of MSM

All-in-one Starline storage for production, backup and long-term archive to LTO

An all-in-one device with integrated LTO drive proved to be the best solution. Savings of a separate server and rack space as well as reduction of cabling are among the advantages of this solution.

Starline's development work on FreeNAS has enabled LTO tape and cloud use for backup and archive with Archiware P5. P5 offers disk, tape and cloud storage as options for backup and archive, enabling all storage strategies.

At MSM Studios, Archiware P5 Backup automatically handles the backup of daily production. P5 has proven itself as a backup solution for many years.

Long-term archiving of all MSM productions is done on LTO tape, the cheapest and most durable professional storage medium. MSM has been using Archiware for 15 years and has written hundreds of LTO tapes with it. Many times in the past, P5 Archive has helped to easily find and restore previous productions. 

Stefan Bock comments: "Sometimes our customers call us because their data is no longer available. In our archive, we find them immediately, which has caused surprise on many occasions and keeps customers coming back." 

All FreeNAS systems are assembled in house at Starline prior to shipment. In-house support technicians test the systems extensively before shipping.

Successful support is part of Starline's company philosophy - for important systems even day and night within four hours (24x7x4). 

The all-in-one solution with an integrated LTO drive by Overland-Tandberg and Archiware P5, fast network connection, large storage capacity and quiet fans optimally supports the demanding workflow in the MSM studios and enables many tasks to be completed more quickly.

Starline's individually tailored server/NAS concepts

  • Variable housing types 
  • Up to more than 400 TB usable capacity
  • OpenZFS and RAID-Z2 for high security
  • File, block and object storage support
  • Replication and snapshots 
  • Hard disks from Western Digital
  • LTO drives and libraries from Overland-Tandberg
  • Fast configuration via wizards in the multilingual GUI
  • Official and community plugins available
  • All-flash and hybrid configuration possible
  • Separate OS and data drives
  • Integration with Archiware P5 for archive, backup and cloning

MSM Studios' Setup

  • Video editing, post production and grading on 3 WS
  • Bluray authoring and encoding including UHD Blurays, Dolby Atmos at 3 WS
  • Audio production and post-production: Voice Recording, Mixing, Mastering
  • Test, reference measurements, calibration, development of innovative audio products and processes, virtual acoustics

 

  • 3D Audio/Immersive Audio Dolby Atoms certified studio, all immersive formats, Fraunhofer MPEG-H (PureAudio: Herbert Grönemeyer Grammy for Best Immersive Production)
  • Recording of concerts, production, pop and classical music (e.g. Sarah Brightman, Vienna Philharmonic, John Williams)
  • FreeNAS with 10Gbit network connection, integrated LTO drive
  • WD 18TB HDs, LTO drive, Archiware P5 server for backup and archive

Starline and FreeNAS with Archiware P5

Starline is a German RAID pioneer and offers a wide range of storage solutions. The NASdeluxe product family, which is based on FreeBSD, becomes an all-in-one solution with Archiware P5. In combination with Archiware, Starline's proprietary brand provides the functions of a backup and archive server. Storage options include LTO drives, tape libraries, RDX drives and cloud storage for backup and archive. Individual configurations offer capacities up to over 400TB and numerous connection options.

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