Game On: Active Storage Powers Cinematic Game Trailers

Beating the Final Boss: Studio Streamlines Workflows

When game franchises like Angry Birds, Just Cause, Borderlands, and Player Unknown Battleground want a trailer for a new release, they don’t want a few cutscenes thrown together. They want a trailer that tells a story—one that gets people excited and has them waiting by their computers, credit card in hand, to buy the game as soon as it’s released. In short, they want “seriously good game trailers”—and that’s exactly how The TrailerFarm describes their work.

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Established in 2011, The TrailerFarm started as a boutique agency founded by a handful of directors based in Brighton, U.K. Over the years, they grew the studio and invested in technology to support everyone from indie game developers to AAA game franchises expected to sell over one million copies. After becoming part of Keywords Studios in 2019, business took off, and today, they have a staff of 38 and work with a bench of more than 40 freelancers.

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The studio grew massively, and their video files more than kept pace, stretching from 4K just a few years ago to 8K today. And all that data has to be stored somewhere. The TrailerFarm needed an active backup and archive solution that could support their emerging next-gen workflow as the studio took on more clients and produced higher resolution videos.

Data Growth Maxes Out Storage

When the team was smaller, The TrailerFarm stored their data in a few different places. More recently, for fast on-premises storage, they invested in a Dell Isilon NAS HD400 to hold archives and used Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive to back up those archives going back to their founding. They kept active projects on another Dell server equipped with Perforce Helix Core software for version control. To back up the Perforce server, they created two accounts on Google’s Business plan, which offered unlimited storage at the time.

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As new projects came in, they moved older projects off the active Perforce server to the archives in Glacier Deep Archive. “There’s a limited amount of space locally on the NAS, so the Amazon data kept increasing over time as new projects came in and pushed older projects up to Glacier Deep Archive,” Guy Mayhew, the southeast U.K. regional IT manager for Keywords Studios, explained. Mayhew joined the team in 2015 to help find solutions to the gaming industry’s unique IT needs, including managing huge amounts of data while keeping workflows uninterrupted.

Taking Damage: Retrieval Fees, Cold Delays, and Storage Caps

The TrailerFarm initially chose Glacier Deep Archive because it was cheap, but the promise of budget storage broke down as staff increasingly needed to pull old projects up for new work, leading to large retrieval fees and costly cold storage delays. Retrievals from Glacier Deep Archive can take up to 48 hours depending on the tier, and Mayhew was the only person on staff who could navigate the interface. Even he found it confusing at times. “I’d have to wait for hours because there’s so much data and so many millions of files on Glacier Deep Archive. I regularly had people coming back to me asking if the files were ready,” Mayhew said.

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In the end, they were spending more and more budget on storage that was supposed to be inexpensive, and Mayhew was spending hours every week searching for files. As his role expanded to managing not just The TrailerFarm’s IT needs, but other Keywords Studios locations as well, he couldn’t afford to spend hundreds of hours a year digging through the archives.

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Mayhew had been growing weary of Glacier Deep Archive for some time, but the tipping point came from another front in the storage battle. When Google changed their storage limits for the Business tier, what used to be unlimited storage for $12/user/month was suddenly capped at 2TB. He considered upgrading to Google Workspace Enterprise to maintain the unlimited storage, but the quoted price would stretch a budget already constrained by Glacier Deep Archive fees. With nearly 100TB of data he needed to move from Google and increasing costs with Amazon, he knew it was time to find an active archive and backup solution that could grow with the business, rather than hampering workflows.

Active Storage Earns Action Points

Mayhew evaluated a few different storage solutions based on cost, reliability, and ease of use. “Other providers had hidden challenges and charges. Backblaze is transparent. After that, it was a combination of access, reliability, simplicity, and the proximity of the European data center that made Backblaze the right choice for us,” he explained.

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Using Backblaze’s Cloud to Cloud Migration with the Glacier Vault connector, Mayhew moved approximately 150TB of archive data from Glacier Deep Archive to Backblaze B2 with no downtime. “The migration process was really simple for me. The Backblaze team just relentlessly kept it all going and sent me regular updates. I would absolutely recommend Backblaze for that reason—the communication was so easy compared to Amazon,” Mayhew said. He then moved around 100TB off of the Google accounts, down to their local NAS, and up to Backblaze B2 as well.

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Now, their full archive going back to year one resides in Backblaze B2. Completed projects are stored locally on their Dell Isilon NAS and backed up to Backblaze B2 weekly. Active projects are kept on their on-premises Perforce server, which backs up to Backblaze B2 nightly. “We’ll still use Google for collaboration. The NAS allows people to access recent projects quickly, and Backblaze is our enormous store where we keep everything as a third place for extra safety,” he explained.

Backblaze B2 Unlocks Invincibility Mode

Mayhew said his Amazon bill dropped almost 50% within weeks of getting started, even before he was done clearing data out of Glacier Deep Archive. Following that quick win, he also avoided overage charges from Google by moving data out of their Google accounts.

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With an active archive and easy-to-use interface, his team can easily access files they need with no delays. “I used to get lost in Glacier Deep Archive. The Backblaze interface lays everything out really clearly. It’s much, much faster, and I can immediately find what I need,” Mayhew explained. He’s no longer the only one who can find old files, saving him hundreds of hours each year.

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The time savings come at a key moment for Mayhew as he takes on more responsibility for Keywords Studios. “I’m the regional IT manager for the southeast U.K., and I’m temporarily helping out some studios in London as well. I’ve got less time, so it’s great not to spend so much time digging around in Glacier Deep Archive,” he said. “If we can get better service, it’s easier, and it costs less, we’ll take that any time.”

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Making seriously good game trailers demands a production pipeline that can scale to suit projects and clients of any size. With seriously good storage that eases production workflows, The TrailerFarm team can focus on what they do best—creating hype-worthy content for both the next big game and the biggest games out there.