Never let storage cost, performance or capacity problems get in the way of spinning a good story.

Few industries pose as many storage challenges as media and entertainment (M&E). Today, there is more video content being produced than ever, and production projects run around the clock to push television series and blockbuster movies to audiences as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, video quality just keeps getting better with higher resolutions, higher frame rates and high dynamic range (HDR) processing —which means video file sizes have grown exponentially.

The storage ramifications are significant. Several petabytes of storage may be required for a complete stereoscopic digital movie project at 4K resolution. And production work at 8K is now under way. By the next decade, total video captured for a single high-end digital production could be hundreds of petabytes, according to analyst firm Coughlin Associates.

In fact, Coughlin forecasts that cloud storage for the M&E industry alone will grow about 13.3x between 2017 and 2023 (from 5.1 to 68.2 exabytes), and overall object storage capacity for media and entertainment will grow about 4.9x between 2017 and 2023, from 10.4 to 51.6 exabytes.

That’s a boatload of data. You need to store all that raw footage, rough cuts and finished product in an a highly secure and reliable environment without breaking the bank. And in today’s fast-paced digital world, you need to be able to access all your assets as fast as possible to meet deadlines and stay within schedules and budgets. That’s because the speed that production teams can store, retrieve and collaborate on projects will play a big role in determining their success.