Energy Utility Company Consolidating RAID arrays and LTO backup systems

The company operates within the energy utility sector, providing natural gas and electricity services. Their team is small, consisting mainly of a core internal staff alongside a handful of contractors and freelance editors. The team works both on-site and remotely, with in-office days mid-week and work-from-home arrangements on other days. They collaborate occasionally with external agency partners, requiring secure and efficient media sharing and management workflows.

The company’s current media management relies heavily on physical storage hardware, including two 30-terabyte RAID arrays for online storage and LTO tape backup systems for incremental and archival backups. Their archive storage is kept both on-site and off-site for disaster recovery purposes. For sharing large media files with freelancers and agencies, they often ship hard drives or use cloud services like Dropbox and Hightail, although access is limited by strict IT security protocols due to their status as part of critical infrastructure. Search and organization are handled with cataloging software and manual memory recall, with limited metadata tagging and inconsistent use of digital asset management tools.

- **Limited storage capacity:** The existing RAID arrays are nearing full capacity, creating bottlenecks in media storage and management. - **Inefficient sharing:** Shipping physical hard drives for large projects is time-consuming and costly, while cloud services are restricted by tight IT security policies. - **Poor searchability:** Asset search depends heavily on manual memory and inconsistent tagging, leading to difficulty in quickly locating reusable footage, especially “Evergreen” assets like wind turbine or solar farm footage that are frequently reused. - **Fragmented system:** Multiple point solutions and manual processes increase complexity and reduce efficiency. - **Resource constraints:** Small internal team limits the bandwidth available for thorough asset cataloging and management.

Shade offers a unified media management platform that streamlines access, search, sharing, and archiving into a single system. By replacing disparate hardware and software solutions with Shade, the company could: - Expand effective storage capacity while reducing reliance on physical drives and tapes. - Enable secure, remote, and frictionless collaboration with internal and external team members, respecting IT security requirements. - Leverage powerful AI-driven search capabilities to quickly locate assets using metadata and content recognition, reducing dependence on manual tagging and memory. - Simplify workflows by consolidating media management tools into one platform, lowering operational overhead. - Improve asset reuse and reduce production costs by making “Evergreen” footage instantly accessible to all stakeholders.