The Nest’s state-of-the-art facility flies above the competition with intelligent storage
Like so many innovative businesses, The Nest Post started life as a husband-and-wife team in a spare room. Now comprising a team of 25 full time staff located at its new home in East London’s iconic creative space, ‘The Nest” in Wapping, next to their studios, Cherryduck Studios, the facility offers 24hr, full-service post production and is the video production partner of choice for many leading London agencies and global brands.
Spread across 8,000 sq. ft of workspace over two floors, cherryduck offers state-of-the-art private editing/grading suites and a whole post production floor, known as The Nest Post.
As part of that expansion, The Nest Post’s storage capacity also had to grow, and quickly. To support the expanded capability at its new location, the post house had to add capacity and upgrade performance of its shared storage system. The Nest Post had to service the existing needs of the new facility, ensure it could meet the expectations of users and look ahead to future growth.
The GB Labs difference
Having relied on GB Labs almost from the start, The Nest Post had first-hand experience of its innovative approach to intelligent storage. More importantly, GB Labs solutions ensured zero compromise on the robustness and resilience needed for 24/7 high intensity operations. It was once again the obvious choice.
After careful consideration, The Nest Post chose GB Labs’ SPACE and HyperSPACE for its expanded facility at The Nest putting in place all the capability it needs for fast shared storage and seamless collaborative workflows.
SPACE broke the mould for network attached storage and is the fastest shared storage on the market, giving The Nest Post access to powerful intelligent storage that is highly scalable and can stand up to even the most demanding workflows.
“What I like about GB Labs is that it’s never about them. It’s always about us and our needs,”
“From our perspective, GB Labs does whatever it can to fit with what we want to do rather than making us alter our goals to fit what they have to offer."
The Nest Post CEO James Vellacott.
Everyone in the creative team at The Nest Post has simultaneous access to projects, with users’ access rights, storage quotas and permitted bandwidth pre-determined to ensure each person gets exactly what they need from the system. Data transfers are swift using 1Gb, 10Gb, 25Gb, 40Gb and 100Gb connections, especially when moving data between tiers of GB Labs’ units.
HyperSPACE, boosts these capabilities even further, accelerating the speed of concurrent 4K, DPX and HD streams to and from SPACE appliances on the network. This functionality effortlessly enabling users to collaborate on 4K DPX workflows or the largest HD workgroups projects, live, across an entire network.
Even better, by using GB Labs technology, The Nest Post was able to repurpose the majority of its existing storage technology, maximising its earlier investments without having to re-learn or re-train to get the best out of the new storage capability.
IP connectivity across the GB Labs systems means that dial-in support can address any issues remotely – anywhere in the world and this is a key factor for The Nest Post as Tom Smith Head of Post Production explained, “In over ten years of working with GB Labs, there’s never been any problem and we know that if we ever need extra support, they are always at the end of the phone. Having people behind the scenes, remotely checking in to do a health check or get a drive back up and running, makes a huge difference. Knowing we've got contingencies and backup solutions in place allows us to focus on what we do best which is creating exciting content."
1.3 million live streams for Lush
Hot on the heels of a move to the new location, came a project for cosmetics firm Lush. The company hosts a lavish annual event, the 'Lush Summit', held at the historic Tobacco Dock in London. This global gathering of Lush employees and fans aims to celebrate the brand and the numerous charitable causes it supports. The event is live streamed across multiple platforms to an engaged, worldwide audience, bringing together speakers and discussion panels on a wide range of socially responsible topics, from human and animal rights issues to the environment – and of course the ethical and cruelty-free development and use of cosmetics.
To support the two-day event, The Nest Post deployed an eight-person post production team to the Tobacco Dock location and needed additional storage capacity and – more importantly – a storage solution that offered portability. GB Labs’ FastNAS F-8 Nitro Studio to the rescue! The solution was chosen not only for its portability and cost-effectiveness, but because it enabled the team to consistently achieve and sustain more than 1.3 million live stream and social media views over the course of the event.
A Foundation for the Future
Since then, The Nest Post have collaborated to create a bespoke server system dedicated to their edit, sound and grading suites.. The system utilises GB Labs’ SPACE, HyperSPACE, ECHO, and VAULT LTO technology, delivering even more high-end performance and security.
The Nest Post’s CEO, James Vellacott concluded, “The demand for digital content and the exponential growth of new TV production companies mean that London’s young creative post-production talent, and the ever-growing need to collaborate with other creative sectors, requires the flexibility, speed, and capacity of what, with GB Labs, we offer at The Nest Post.”
