- Space Type: Multi-Suite Creative Studio & Render Facility
- Industry Focus: Cinematic Production & Game Development
The Infrastructure Challenge
Digital media and game engineering firms deal with massive, uncompressed video containers and dense asset files. A single project folder can scale into multiple terabytes.
Editors, colorists, and sound designers must read and write to a centralized Storage Area Network (SAN) concurrently in real time. If the local network fabric lacks sufficient speed or experiences latency, video playback will drop frames, audio sync will drift, and asset rendering times will balloon.
The Emerald City IT Architecture
For Ballard's creative sector, Emerald City IT implements ultra-high-speed storage networks built on 10-Gigabit and 25-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE/25GbE) frameworks. Our technicians skip traditional copper connections for the core production loop, running direct-attach copper (DAC) or fiber optic patches from individual editing workstations directly into a high-capacity enterprise core switch.
This configuration links editing bays to a centralized, multi-disk flash storage array. This allows creative teams to scrub through raw, uncompressed 8K footage directly on the server with zero caching latency.
For the broader facility, we run structured Cat6A lines to administrative desks and production tracking areas, ensuring every drop can support full 10Gbps throughput.
Network stability is critical when local computers are rendering complex scenes or compiling game builds at 100% capacity over consecutive days. To prevent network overhead from causing packet loss, our teams deploy advanced Quality of Service (QoS) routing rules. These rules ensure data traffic for active video rendering is prioritized, while general office internet traffic is allocated a secondary tier.
Our engineering partnership with WatchGuard and Revolutionary Technology ensures that all pre-release digital assets and intellectual property remain locked behind enterprise-grade firewalls. ESET Endpoint tools monitor local workstations for unauthorized data exports or incoming malicious scripts.
Furthermore, our TeamViewer 24-hour remote platform gives our technicians the ability to monitor the thermal performance and bandwidth metrics of network switches during heavy rendering cycles. This allows us to resolve potential bottlenecks before they disrupt production timelines.