Murrieta, CA – February 8, 2022 - Christopher Kennan, Director of Technology at Crew Cuts, discovered DigitalGlue and the creative.space platform at NAB while looking for a frictionless solution to replace their existing storage. Onboarding a large team of creatives to new technology can feel like an impossible task for managers. While waiting to make a decision, Keenan worked with the creative.space team to help shape software features that would remove roadblocks and directly benefit teams like his in the industry. When his service level agreement (SLA) finally reached end of life, creative.space supplied Crew Cuts with an unbeatable service contract providing storage hardware, software, and support for around the same cost as renewing their existing SLA.

Crew Cuts is a community of tech savvy editors, artists, designers, storytellers, producers, animators, and directors dedicated to bringing their clients’ stories to life on screen. The New York-based post production facility joins the other post production houses, corporate entities, and houses of worship around the United States who have adopted DigitalGlue’s creative.space shared storage-as-a-service offering. For the team of 40+ editors at Crew Cuts, having a storage solution that was easy to adopt and use was non-negotiable. The creative.space desktop application has allowed Crew Cuts’ team of editors to easily transition to the platform without special training. The desktop application makes mounting projects and accessing media simple, replacing the multi-vendor solution they were previously using.

Keenan and his team work on many projects at once with strict deadlines and cannot risk unwanted downtime due to storage corruption or failure. With creative.space’s proactive support, the DigitalGlue support team is alerted by built-in system monitoring to any warning signs so that issues are dealt with before causing a service interruption. With the creative.space web app, Chris can manage daily operation of the storage, such as creating projects and assigning user permissions and leave the technical management of the system to DigitalGlue. The support agreement for the previous storage solution included only reactive phone and email support, which put the burden of preventing interruptions on Chris and his I.T. team.

Before creative.space, Crew Cuts purchased their shared storage as a capital expense with an additional recurring annual support contract. This was in addition to the cost of third-party software for project management. Compared to other enterprise NAS solutions on the market, creative.space’s operational expense (OPEX) pricing model provides unparalleled cost savings. Crew Cuts implemented creative.space’s //AUTEUR shared storage server with 384TB of RAW capacity. The chassis has 24 16TB helium-filled SAS drives providing 247TB of usable space after RAID 6. Unlike a purchase or a lease, when Crew Cuts is ready to scale, their creative.space service contract can simply be amended to reflect the new monthly price for added drives and/or other upgrades, instead of requiring a new contract. From now on, instead of saving up capital funds for a massive infrastructure upgrade every few years, Crew Cuts will have DigitalGlue as a partner to gracefully replace hardware as needed and spread out the cost as an operational expense.

DigitalGlue believes that the key to a successful technology partnership is an open line of communication between vendor and client. For 20 years, DigitalGlue has worked closely with major network, studio, and corporate clients to develop custom software for real-world video workflows. DigitalGlue’s software team is unique with the expertise needed to develop complex yet simple to use solutions quickly through the backing of a team of industry-veteran video engineers. With the creative.space platform, DigitalGlue hopes to address industry-wide workflow challenges through collaboration, encouraging the customers and the content creation community to submit their ideas and feature requests to drive the creation of a user experience that is simple, enjoyable, and frictionless for users, regardless of their technical knowledge. Now that they have access to the //AUTEUR shared storage, the Crew Cuts team will continue to shape the creative.space roadmap, simplifying the storage experience for all users.

If you would like to learn more about creative.space or schedule an interactive demo, email sales@digitalglue.com or call (888) 519-2021 today!