Revolutionizing Post-Production Infrastructure at REDLAB with Scale Logic and the VAST Data Platform

The VAST Data Platform has modernized and simplified REDLAB’s infrastructure management and operations while improving efficiency, reliability, scalability and performance—all at a lower price-point than originally anticipated.

Industry Media & Entertainment
Use Case Post Production
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Overview

REDLAB is an Emmy-winning post-production facility based in Toronto, Canada, renowned for its exceptional services tailored to episodic series, feature films, and commercial projects. With a Dolby-certified facility offering full-service post-production, REDLAB boasts cutting-edge capabilities, including Dolby Vision-approved DI color suites and Dolby Atmos-certified sound suites. Their interdisciplinary approach fosters collaboration among experts, resulting in innovative and high-quality work.

Actively engaged in the local industry, REDLAB partners with organizations to address industry challenges and excel in successful filmmaking. Notable projects like Schitt’s Creek and Star Trek: Discovery highlight their expertise in post-production, VFX, color grading, editing, and sound supervision across various media formats.

As a longstanding partner of Scale Logic, REDLAB turned to them for their next generation infrastructure needs. Scale Logic is a global leader in advanced media workflow infrastructure, and is a go-to partner for the world’s largest companies seeking future-resistant data asset management solutions. “Scale Logic understood our facility and the scope of our needs. They suggested VAST Data, which checked all the boxes for us. The VAST Data Platform they proposed is faster and more efficient than our existing SAN, and easy to scale up as our needs arise.

—Kyoungkuen Chung, Technical Director, REDLAB

Background

Over the course of a decade, REDLAB relied on Scale Logic’s HyperFS SAN to meet rigorous speed demands for grading and finishing uncompressed footage across multiple suites simultaneously, with only minimal downtime required for maintenance.

Over time—and once performance and cost aligned with their needs—REDLAB planned to transition to a NAS solution. However, as they began their search, they found that none of the options they tested were sufficient.

The solutions we tried out just couldn’t meet the performance numbers that the manufacturers claimed. I believe this was because most storage vendors were simply adding faster drives to an outdated architecture and handcuffing themselves with protocols that were literally decades old.

—Andy Hunter, REDLAB Owner

Outcome

Since integrating the VAST Data Platform, REDLAB has experienced a multitude of benefits.

Offering lightning-fast storage at an affordable price, the platform caters to REDLAB's extensive data needs without introducing complexity or slowdowns. With its innovative distributed systems architecture (DASE), the platform’s smart system eliminates communication dependencies between machines—allowing parallel read and write operations at any scale.

Furthermore, the VAST Data Platform’s capability to keep data synchronized across different locations globally enables REDLAB to access their data quickly and easily from anywhere—enhancing efficiencies in data analysis and creative processes.

Moreover, the solution offers REDLAB long-term peace of mind with an 99.99999999% uptime guarantee, and scalability into the exabyte range.

One of the key selling features for us was the ability of the VAST Data Platform to do more with less. Through a probe of our older storage, we learned that by using the VAST Data Platform’s data reduction technology, we could greatly reduce the capacity required. This has translated into a much smaller initial investment than we had originally thought we would need. And since the architecture of the VAST Data Platform is completely scalable in both performance and/or capacity, we are in a much better position to scale as we need to.

—Kyoungkuen Chung, REDLAB Technical Director

This platform has basically reinvented how newer data platforms can be utilized. We were impressed with the VAST Data Platform and felt that we had finally found a solution that could work for us in terms of the performance and capabilities we had been seeking.

Andy Hunter
Owner, REDLAB