A global media and entertainment company needed to move data behind several of its brands to independent infrastructure by a fixed business deadline. Instead of buying more on-premises storage, it migrated 3 PB to Azure Native Qumulo, re-migrated the full data set in under 72 hours when requirements changed, and cut over on time. Capacity on demand, not on a hardware delivery schedule.
When the Deadline Can't Move, Storage Has To
Business change rarely waits for infrastructure. A reorganization is announced. A division is spun out. The business sets the deadline, not IT. When that happens, the storage underneath has to keep up.
That moment came as the media & entertainment company began separating several of its brands into a new standalone entity. Roughly 3 PB of data supporting those brands sat on on-premises scale-out NAS at one of the company's northeast facilities, and it needed to move to independent infrastructure by the end of the month to meet a significant financial milestone tied to the separation.
The obvious path was the status quo: buy more of the same on-premises hardware and replicate the data across. On paper, it looked like the lowest-risk option. But with only weeks to work with, waiting on equipment orders, delivery, and installation before moving any data carried its own risk.
With weeks, not months, on the clock, the time it took to stand up storage became as important as the storage itself.
The Challenge: A Fixed Deadline and 3 PB to Move
The company's challenge wasn't simply finding somewhere to put 3 PB of data. It was doing it fast enough, and well enough, for the brands to cut over on time.
The requirements were clear: strong performance in both IOPS and throughput for production applications, easy integration with existing workflows and migration tooling, and a platform ready to receive data immediately. Some workloads were highly transactional, so users needed a consistent experience from day one.
The company had also set a longer-term direction toward a hybrid cloud strategy. Putting the separated brands on new on-premises hardware would solve the immediate problem, but it would tie the new entity to the same hardware refresh cycles the company was planning to move beyond.
The company needed storage that could be provisioned in minutes, scale to petabytes immediately, and tune performance as the migration unfolded.
That was the trigger that brought Qumulo in.
The Solution: Cloud Capacity, Ready in Minutes
Technologent, the company's channel partner, was close to the project and recognized that its requirements aligned with Azure Native Qumulo. Working together, Qumulo and Technologent presented a competitive proposal to the company's storage team and made the case for the cloud.
The company already knew Qumulo. Its post-production organization had started with 450 TB of ANQ roughly two years earlier and had since grown that footprint to around 1.5 PB. The company's enterprise technology leadership selected Qumulo as the project's first-choice cloud storage platform and assigned it to the post-production team that already ran ANQ day to day.
The core argument was speed. With ANQ, an instance could come online in minutes, and migration could begin immediately, with no hardware to order, ship, or rack. Komprise, the company's chosen data migration platform, moved the data, with Microsoft and Qumulo supporting the effort throughout.
Instead of waiting for hardware to arrive, the company could start moving data as soon as it made the decision.
The resulting architecture gave the separated brands a cloud-native foundation from day one, aligned with the company's hybrid cloud direction.
From Decision to Cutover in a Few Weeks
The company committed to ANQ in early February. Qumulo provisioned an initial instance and expanded it from 500 TB to 3 PB as the scope became clear, including on a Saturday morning call when the team needed the capacity limit raised. The first full 3 PB migration began in late February and completed in early March, taking roughly two weeks.
User testing then surfaced an issue: one transactional application didn't perform as its team expected. Rather than troubleshoot in place with a shrinking window, Qumulo and Komprise agreed on a fresh approach. Qumulo stood up a new instance on its latest release, with Read Cache V2, and scaled performance to 35 GB/s at the company's request.
In less than 72 hours, the team re-migrated the full 3 PB data set to the new instance. Users began testing the following week; testing ran for about a week, and the company cut over at the end of March, meeting its deadline.
The ability to stand up a new instance, scale performance, and re-migrate 3 PB in under 72 hours turned a late-stage setback into a minor adjustment.
One Platform, Delivered as a Service
The new environment moved the separated brands off on-premises hardware and onto a cloud-native file platform delivered as a service.
Since cutover, the environment has met the performance needs of the company's applications, and the data set has grown from 3 PB to 3.5 PB. Qumulo has handled implementation, upgrades, capacity expansion, new instances, and performance scaling as needed. Once peak migration performance was no longer required, the company scaled throughput back from 35 GB/s to 6 GB/s, closer to its steady-state needs, and the change went smoothly.
“I can’t say enough good things about your product and team,” said the company's Vice President of Post Production.
Instead of sizing hardware for peak demand, the company built a foundation where capacity and performance follow the workload: scale up for migration, scale back for day-to-day operations.
Business Impact
Deadline met
The full 3 PB migration and cutover were completed by the end of March, in time for the brand separation milestone.
Performance on demand
Throughput scaled to 35 GB/s for migration and testing, then back to 6 GB/s for steady-state operations, without disruption.
Rapid recovery from change
When one application needed a different configuration, Qumulo provisioned a new instance and re-migrated the full 3 PB data set in under 72 hours.
Room to grow
The environment has already grown from 3 PB to 3.5 PB with no new hardware to buy or install.
Rapid time to value
With Technologent, Komprise, Microsoft, and Qumulo working as one team, the company went from decision to cutover in under two months.
The Takeaway: Capacity Should Move at the Speed of Business
The company may be a global media business, but its infrastructure challenge is familiar across industries.
A company divests a business unit. An acquisition closes. A production ramps up overnight. A financial or regulatory deadline lands on the calendar. A data center lease runs out.
The details change, but the infrastructure question remains the same:
How quickly can you give the business the capacity it needs?
For the company, the answer was Azure Native Qumulo. By choosing the cloud over another round of on-premises hardware, it moved 3 PB, recovered from a late-stage change in under 72 hours, and cut over in time to meet its deadline.
The takeaway extends far beyond media and entertainment:
For this global media company, Infinite Capacity meant storage that could be provisioned, scaled, and rebuilt at the speed of a business deadline, not a hardware delivery schedule.