Symply Perifery is an S3 cloud native in-facility appliance with unlimited scalability, embedded application support optimized for media workflows, and public cloud connectivity.

Today’s workflows are complex. Growing amounts of content is being created in studios and in remote locations. Production is often split between facilities and with remote workers. With more delivery being cloud based, the need to retain media assets for the long term while maintaining fast, frequent access is a must. Ensuring content is quickly and easily available to internal and external users at the lowest cost can be a huge challenge. Whether you are monetizing content through distribution or delivery, or archiving assets for reuse, you need to ensure content is cost-predictably protected for long-term preservation and can be easily accessed at any time.

Tape library based systems are undoubtedly cost-effective, but content is not instantly accessible; and tapes need to be migrated over time which often incurs costs both in time and money. The public cloud solves some problems but raises questions of its own including the challenges of unpredictable recurring costs, questions over data sovereignty, and the biggest factor, which is almost universal, is the inability to meet local performance requirements, especially at the Edge.

Powered by DataCore software, Symply Perifery is a S3 native, highly scalable appliance built on parallel x86 architecture, with elastic content protection, that enables GB and GB/sec of throughput as nodes are scaled out a linear fashion, with each node being able to perform all the functions in the cluster.

Embedded applications

Symply Perifery includes S3 embedded application support, for best-of-breed workflow-centric media management tools including axle ai, axledit, DataCore FileFly, StorageDNA(R) DNAFabric, and Nebula Bridge.

Why S3? Well S3 is now a ubiquitous standard utilizing web-based protocols HTTP(S) and REST-based application programming interface (API) as a simple, scalable and reliable way of interfacing with S3 enabled applications. Using S3 compatible storage means easy connection to these applications, ensuring no workflow disruptions.The hand-picked applications work together to provide an unmatched content preservation experience. No matter the type of workflow or where content is created or stored, Symply Perifery offers a simple and complete solution with 100% cost predictability.

DNAfabric provides management, metadata, and analytics services, while DNAFabric Data Managers provide data visibility and data mobility services to Perifery. Symply Perifery is designed to seamlessly integrate into any workflow pipeline, supporting Cloud, NAS and SAN file systems including any open NFS/SMB filesystems, Avid Nexis, Quantum StorNext(R), NetApp(R), Isilon, Qumulo, Facilis, SNS Evo, Scale Logic, EditShare, TrueNAS/ZFS(TM), as well as 3rd party cloud file-systems Avid EOD, Qumulo, SoftNAS/ZFS, and LucidLink.

Nebula Bridge connects your locally stored content in NTFS, ReFS, SMB/NFS shares, with S3 Perifery while preserving native, non-proprietary formats to ensure transparent access to the performant, highly scalable and durable S3 endpoint of Perifery.

Symply Perifery Usage Models

Why Symply Perifery?

Symply Perifery provides a facility based native S3 content preservation solution that radically simplifies the ability to manage, store, and protect content while allowing fast S3/HTTP access to any application, device, or end-user. Perifery seamlessly integrates into your workflow, transforming your assets into flexible and immediately accessible content that enables remote workflows, on-demand access, and massive scalability.

Perifery does not use a file system, unlike traditional NAS and SAN systems, and even some object storage solutions. This makes Perifery many times more efficient at storing data, in fact it is able to utilize over 95% of available disk capacity with no performance degradation for the high level of capacity utilization. Perifery utilizes advanced erasure coding algorithms unlike traditional RAID, providing greater data security and guarding against data-rot that can lead to unrecoverable data. In addition, Perifery can recover from drive failures 25x faster than traditional RAID storage. As a result, disk failures can be recovered in as little as 90 minutes vs. days or even weeks for RAID 6 deployments. Perifery’s simple seal of integrity function validates the integrity of your data at any time. These advanced features provide enhanced data durability so the mean time to data loss (MTTDL) can now be measured on the scale of eons (27,000 years to be precise for a single cluster).

Scaling-out and Scaling-up is made super simple with Perifery, one or more nodes can be added at any time without any down time for installation, formatting or migration required. The Perifery architecture features parallelised access, so more nodes equal more performance - GBs of throughput for faster operations including archiving, restoring and streaming of content using S3 or HTTP. Perifery easily scales out to retain your key assets as your requirements grow, but it also does not allow data sprawl, with easy-to-configure retention policies that mean you keep only assets for as long as you intend.

Costly and time-consuming hardware refresh cycles and forklift upgrades are a thing of the past with Perifery. Inevitably at some point, hardware ages out. But an easy auto retire feature means you never have to take your system offline. Decommissioning aging hardware is a simple one-click operation. Additionally, individual failed hard drives or whole swaths of hard drives can be replaced in the future with the current latest capacities, and aged appliances replaced with the latest hardware with Perifery rebalancing on the fly. You will never have to migrate data again. Ever. No interruption of service, no worries of disk failure during migration.

Symply Perifery Features for Media and Entertainment

Symply Perifery has many native features implemented specifically for creative professionals. Such as a comprehensive custom metadata and search function, that enriches your library of content using custom metadata headers, and easily search for, or reference them in your workflows.

Perifery supports multi-tenancy, easily allowing for the creation of specific workspaces for individual customers, and built-in administrative functions to allow for easy management of tenants, buckets, quotas, and integration into rights management solutions. Detailed usage and accounting reports can be created making billing easy for storage-as-a-service usage models.

Perifery can also be used to deliver content straight from (or to) your performant cluster over HTTP or S3, in many cases negating the need for costly accelerated file transfer applications.

Finally, Perifery supports partial file restore (PFR), so you can clip your parent assets directly from the archive layer, for editing, review or streaming, within Perifery’s HTML5 Content UI. Once the clips are created, they can be shared via a simple HTTP URL. Perifery has broad codec support through its API that allows for integration into any S3 enabled asset management solutions.

Features and Benefits

● S3 Native Interface: Easy integration to existing workflows with support for 350+ applications
● Embedded S3 Application Support: Run ecosystem partner apps on the appliance to build custom workflows.
● Easy search, access, and retrieval of content via WebUI
● Deliver content straight from your performant Perifery appliance over HTTP or S3
● Multi-tenancy support with administration features for billing reports by domain, based on usage and access audits, and more
● Partial File Restore: Video files can be clipped and restored within Perifery
● Elastic Content Protection utilizing erasure coding provides the highest levels of data protection.
● Supports synchronous and asynchronous replication between Symply Perifery clusters for DR, enhanced data durability, and content distribution
● Supports Backup/DR, and object tiering to SymplyNEBULA and other public clouds.
● Integrates with Spectra Logic BlackPearl(R) and Tape Libraries for LTO support.
● Keep your content secure with Encryption in Flight and at Rest, Object immutability (WORM), and Audit Trails
● Darkive provides auto spin down of hard disks to reduce power consumption
● Comprehensive open API
● Unparalleled 24x7 Support
● No more disruptive data migrations

How can Symply Perifery with embedded Fabric help my Avid workflows?

DNAfabric enables Avid data management services including backup, archive and tiering across primary storage systems e.g. Avid Nexis and Symply Perifery. Added with v2.0, DNAfabric enables data tools for Avid Edit on Demand with the ability to seamlessly sync media and projects across one or more in facility Nexis systems and Avid EOD Nexis storage.

• Compatible with Avid Nexis, 3rd party Avid compatible storage and Avid EOD
• Backup and snapshots Avid Media Workspaces and project bin
• Avid Nexis and EOD Archiving to Symply Perifery with Stub-files
• Multi-way replication of Avid Nexis workspaces and projects with Perifery as a cache
• Selective retrievals and conforms via ALE straight from Perifery
• Ransomware protection and detection
• Open data and metadata

Download PDF Solution Brief

How can Symply Perifery integrate with LTO?

At Symply we understand both disk and tape (LTO) storage solutions. As discussed, LTO is often extremely attractive for high-capacity archives, primarily due to the lower cost per TB of LTO media and the fact that a tape can sit in a library or indeed in a storage container using little or no power. Time to access is, however, a problem for tape especially in industries where content may only be valuable for a finite period of time.

In some instances, a hybrid solution incorporating both fast in facility S3 native storage and LTO is the right answer, which is why Symply partners with Spectra Logic. In this scenario, the Symply Perifery can be used to store work-in-progress content, then after a period of time, defined by the administrator, the content can be tiered to LTO via the Spectra Logic BlackPearl S3 appliance connected to a Tape Library. The tiered object on the Perifery cluster can be replaced by a zero-byte stub file freeing up capacity. This can not only provide a very low cost per TB Glacier type tier of storage, but also the ability to export data off-site for disaster recovery.

Speaking of disaster recovery, Symply Perifery can also integrate with Spectra Logic BlackPearl and tape libraries for a traditional backup/DR workflow, whereby Perifery automatically replicates a bucket(s) to the BlackPearl S3 appliance, configured to make one or more copies of the objects on LTO, so duplicate LTO tapes can be removed from the library for offsite storage.

How can Symply Perifery integrate with SymplyNEBULA or other public clouds?

The growth in the use of public cloud storage has been remarkable and the recent pandemic has further fuelled adoption. At Symply we launched our own performant cloud storage back in 2021, based on a globally distributed data storage mesh where both object storage and high-capacity networks function as a single platform that allow fast access to S3 data pools from any connected location or cloud provider.

Typically, there are two broad barriers to cloud adoption for customers with 100s TB or PBs of data. The first is the time taken to migrate into the public cloud. The second is the uncertainty in many cases of what data needs to be moved to the cloud, and the fear of egress charges should the data need to be retrieved.

The combination of Perifery and NEBULA solves these problems by providing a fast performant in facility scale-out cluster that can tier objects (based on administrator defined policies) to public cloud (a cloud cache in effect), the tiered objects can be replaced by a zero-byte stub. This frees up local capacity on the cluster for more current projects. Active data is therefore secured on the cluster for fast local access, and any stubbed objects are retrieved from the cloud as they are requested by S3 applications. This hybrid approach provides the best of both worlds, scalable high performance in facility storage and limitless cloud capacity.

This hybrid solution can also be used for more traditional backup and disaster recovery usage models, in which content written to specific buckets within Perifery are automatically replicated to a corresponding bucket in NEBULA. These bucket(s) can also be replicated between NEBULA storage nodes to further enhance data durability, or for sharing data across geographically dispersed groups.

How can Symply Perifery and Nebula Bridge help with Hybrid workflows?

Do you need to free up space on primary storage systems? However, you also want to avoid downtime, disruption, and ensure that data is secured on a highly scalable and durable in facility storage appliance, then Perifery with embedded Nebula Bridge is the answer.

File server extension with Nebula Bridge enables organizations to infinitely scale storage on-the-fly and keep all data accessible to users and legacy applications with no change to workflow. Bridge lets users seamlessly extend their primary storage (NTFS, ReFS or SMB/NFS shares) into Perifery, providing a single, performant and massively scalable workspace, with no interruption to workflow. Content transparently migrated to Perifery maintains its native format, Active Directory permission and file permissions, so you maintain control over user access.

Nebula Bridge is a kernel-level software-only file system filter native to Windows, file server extension is achieved without additional hardware, vendor lock, or tamper points, and is transparent to users and applications. Bridge blends in facility primary disk with Perifery, into a seamless, single namespace. Partial restore makes it fast and easy to retrieve only the needed portion of a file, not the complete file.

The solution also Includes intelligent malware protection that prevents corrupted files from being replicated to Perifery so backups, DR and archives are not compromised by ransomware or malware.