Dell Technologies Software and Solutions

One of the greatest use cases for Dell PowerScale for our studio is in virtual production, where we have many computers that are all running a single program across all of them. They all need to be tied together and basically accessing the same assets all at once. The usual way to do this is to have a copy of everything on each computer. The problem becomes when someone wants to make a change, for example a large change to it. Now that change has to persist across all of the different computers that are running the LED wall, and that takes time, time that productions do not have. By having Dell PowerScale, all of the computers can access the same piece of data all at once. So you change it once, it changes it everywhere all at once.

The biggest impact that Dell PowerScale has made for our business is in virtual production, where we have multiple media servers running an LED stage. In one case, we have 16 different servers running one very large, super high fidelity LED wall. When we are running something such as Unreal Engine, the basic way to do it is to have a copy of the project that you are putting up on the wall on every single computer, which works fine until you want to make a pretty big change. When you make that change, now that change has to be submitted across all of those computers, which takes time; it could be upwards of 45 minutes before you could be shooting again, and that is not something that you ever want to tell a producer. Now with Dell PowerScale, all of those computers, all of those media servers can access that one piece of data and change it one time, and they are all accessing the same file, so it immediately changes. That speed is something that no one else can offer, so it is huge for us.

At Orbital Studios, my role in using or managing Dell PowerScale is crucial. We need to have overkill for everything because productions do not want to be down for five minutes, which costs money. Our whole objective is to make sure that we are not the reason why production is slowed down. Features such as Dell PowerScale really help to make sure that we have the fastest speeds. We can iterate quickly. We can access all of the data that we need directly on all of our systems all at once. It is also a security measure for us because there is a level of security by having all that data on-site, on-premise, that a lot of our clients really want to have.

There are two things that we love most about Dell PowerScale: one is the speed of the data that we get. We are able to access our data because of the Solidigm solid-state drives very quickly. Also, those drives are rock solid. That is the other thing that we are loving is that we never have to worry about some kind of failure happening on our storage side of things.

Currently, Dell PowerScale is the center of our mainframe of our core of our business, and it is where we store everything. It is where we access everything. It allows us to access our partners and actually drive our partners' projects throughout the world, which is super helpful for us. As we continue to grow and become more mobile as a virtual production provider, Dell PowerScale will start to show up on our mobile stages. For instance, we have recently taken on Chicago, so our facilities now operate out of Cinespace Chicago, where they do the series Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med. All of those shows have their own libraries of assets. By having something such as Dell PowerScale on the stage, we can store all of those assets in one place where together they have decided they want to work together as they do, because they are all in the same offices. Now they can share all those assets, and they are all now directly available on the stage. That is a huge game-changer because sometimes you show up and everything was approved, and everybody says this is the one we want to use. Then you get there, and the director says, 'It is not exactly what I want. Let us see what else we have.' Now we have a catalog of thousands and thousands of terabytes of things that we can get access to.

Dell PowerScale out of the box has a lot of amazing features, and we have really loved incorporating them into our entire ecosystem for technology. Improvements could potentially involve using AI. I am sure they will find ways to reduce the amount of data that is being stored by finding the same files that are copied over and over again and maybe creating one file with a root structure to get to that. I think that is probably something that they are working on. I would love to see that because once again, you are reducing the amount of data that we need to store. As I said before, we are always needing more and more because data gets bigger and bigger. Ways that we can continue to try to compress that as it keeps getting bigger will just help us keep inside that sort of ever-growing need.

We have been using Dell PowerScale for about four years now.

I do not see any concerns, but so far we have never had Dell PowerScale go down, be slow, or give us any kind of issue that hurt us in any way on a production or even just on a non-production day, so we are very happy with its reliability.

The process is very simple to scale Dell PowerScale. You can just continue to add more units to the system, and my understanding is that the more units that you add, the faster it gets. The more units that you add, the faster it gets, which is kind of amazing. It does not make sense to me, but that is what it does.

I do not call the Dell customer service and support team that; I feel they are an integral part of our business. We have built friendships, and we have built these relationships that go far beyond support, and when you need support, they are 100% there.

When I started Orbital Studios six years ago, I do not know that I believed that a technical service partner such as Dell would ever take on a company such as ours or be so involved in what we do, and it really has been a game-changer for us.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate Dell's customer service and support a 1,000.

At Orbital, we had tried solutions across the board. We had separate SSD drives, we had external drives that we would just run from office to office, and we had no central data storage hub that we could all rely on and know where things are at all times. I could not even tell you the brands of the different ones that we have had. We certainly had non-solid-state drives that failed, and they fail often. When you are in a business such as ours, we cannot have data fail. The more that we can protect that and really feel in our minds a piece of mind that that is not something that is going to happen, the Solidigm solid-state drives have been just rock solid inside Dell PowerScale, and they continue to be, and we love to be able to rely on that.

The biggest return on investment that we would get with Dell PowerScale is the speed of production. We have to be fast. We have to be top of the line constantly. We are sitting inside a multi-million dollar stage, driving multi-million dollars worth of content, with more and more millions of dollars standing around us in talent and in equipment. We cannot be the slowest one. We have to be bleeding edge all the time to stay up with what production needs, and being ahead of them is even better. Something such as Dell PowerScale puts us ahead of all of our competitors because of the speed at which we can iterate while we are on set.

Every time Orbital looks at a new technology or taking on a new product, we do extensive research. We are constantly trying to make sure we are making the right decisions with the money we are spending because every dollar counts. We do not want to buy something and have it be obsolete in a year, which is really hard with computers because they usually are. I would say that still to this day, hands down, there is no solution such as Dell PowerScale.

Dell PowerScale and the other Dell products that we use together form an ecosystem for us that provides us with the top-level, bleeding-edge technology that we need constantly for speed, for power, for everything that we do driven by AI. Everything stays at the top level, cutting edge or bleeding edge because of Dell and Dell PowerScale.

The thing about data is it never gets smaller. It is constantly growing, fidelity is constantly growing, and we have to keep up with that. Televisions are currently 4K and 8K and soon they will be 12K, and that means you have to film at those higher resolutions, which means we need higher resolution data to support that. That constant chain of events is fully supported by Dell.

A big part of our growth has been in AI, and a lot of that is supported by Dell PowerScale. A lot of that is because we are now writing our own programs to both manage our projects and manage our assets, and also develop new ways of doing things such as Gaussian splatting, neural radiance fields, and different ways to project 3D assets on an LED wall. All of those things are supported because of the underlying data that is required in order to make that happen.

I would rate this review a 1,000.