Global Gamemaker Empowers Collaboration, Accelerates Project Delivery

Accelerating Project Delivery Across the Globe

This top tier, global media, entertainment and gaming company is a much-loved household name. With design and production talent spread across the globe, they wanted to modernize their file storage infrastructure so that they could optimize their workforce productivity.

When File Sharing Makes Meeting Tight Deadlines Tough

Each of their design teams had strict deadlines to deliver media content, merchandise, and gaming.

They used a combination of Windows file storage, and hosted tools like Dropbox and Media Shuttle for file sharing. However, this was a slow process. The file sizes they work with made it challenging, and sometimes impossible, to share files across continents in a practical and timely manner.

24 Hours for Data Updates

Company-wide file sharing was enabled using scheduled replication of files across every site. Each time a user made a file change, it took 24 hours to get to a user in another region because their existing file storage, which included Dell Servers and Nimble SAN arrays, replicated data only once every 24 hours.

File Sharing Needed to Change

The ideal solution to these file sharing challenges needed to empower highly performant global collaboration, and to offer file locking functionality so team members could work collaboratively, without risking file corruption by accidental overwriting, or creating file versions.

CloudFS Let Them Use AWS Like a Globally Available Data Center

Panzura CloudFS overcame distance and latency to let the entire company work as if everyone were under one roof.

Data from all locations was deduplicated, and consolidated into a single, global, authoritative data source.

Panzura’s global namespace and distributed global file locking allows their users to work on the same “golden” copy of a file, without worrying about overwriting another designer, or being overwritten.

Real-time Data Updates

Instead of waiting for legacy NAS storage to run its daily data replication and transfer, to make files consistent in every location, users can now see file updates as soon as they’re saved. Even if they were made by a user on the other side of the world.

That has meant teams can stay focussed on their tasks, and get more work done, without running into IT challenges.

Agility and Flexibility

Panzura hasn’t just allowed the company to leverage talent spread across numerous locations, it also gives them the ability to shift the right workforce to the right project at a moment’s notice.

Any office with excess capacity of manpower or a specialized skill can be available to work on a project in another region of the world.

Finding and Auditing Files in Seconds

Finding files, and tracking user actions, can consume thousands of IT hours every year.  Now, the company’s IT team can search, audit and monitor files and file activity across the entire organization, from one dashboard, using Panzura Data Services.

Auditing files and folders has given the admins insight to specific users and how they are making edits, as well as spotting abnormalities. Data Services also enables them to search for content within seconds; easily finding and gaining access files from multiple locations and previous versions.

The Right Cloud Data Management Technology Enables Faster Growth

Empowering the company’s design, marketing, and production teams to collaborate and share content seamlessly, allows them to focus on delivering quality work, faster. This in turn accelerates their pace of growth.

At the same time, freeing up IT time allows that area of the business to focus on improvements, rather than solely on operations.