Media storage configuration for Flow Production Tracking Enterprise Docker
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Contents
This article explains how to properly configure your media storage for Flow Production Tracking.
It is intended for Flow Production Tracking Administrators.
Glossary
DAS - Direct-Attached Storage.
Media storage - Generic term to refer to the place where your Flow Production Tracking media is stored.
NAS - Network Attached Storage.
SAN - Storage Area Network.
Media storage
Flow Production Tracking makes intensive usage of media storage to store your video files, attachments, and transcoding artifacts, with files constantly being written and read. The amount of space used for this media is based on the specific way your production uses Flow Production Tracking, but can be expected to grow over time.
Storage specs
Either SAN, NAS, or DAS can be used for media storage. Each has its own advantages.
The main advantage of SAN/NAS is the storage capacity extensibility. It is easier to extend storage when using network storage.
The main advantage of DAS is performance. Physical drives can reach better I/O throughput.
As easily increasing storage space over time is usually more important to the requirements of the media storage, we recommend setting up a NAS and using the NFS protocol. A correctly configured NFS storage will be sufficient in terms of performance, and will offer you more flexibility. See Hardware specs for Flow Production Tracking Enterprise for hardware recommendations regarding NFS.
Media in Flow Production Tracking
Flow Production Tracking handles three main types of artifacts:
- Thumbnails. Reduced size version of images that are used in the UI to help identify things visually.
- Video. These files are transcoded in a web friendly format to allow users to view them in the Flow Production Tracking Web Application.
- Attachments. Non-viewable media files that can be attached to different entities (Tasks, Notes, etc.). These files are not transcoded by the transcoding service.
All the media is stored into two distinct subfolders in the Flow Production Tracking media folder:
- files. Contains thumbnails.
- storage. Contains video files and attachments.
Configuring media folders
See the Flow Production Tracking Enterprise Quick Start Guide for more details about how to configure the media folder for Flow Production Tracking Enterprise Docker when using external storage.