HITS

HITS 2023: CoreSite Explores How Collaboration is Fostered By Data Centers

Broadcast media and entertainment is a highly collaborative, content-centric industry, according to Ken Bamberg, sales director at CoreSite.

CoreSite, with 28 highly connected data centers in 10 key markets and a digital ecosystem of more than 775 network, cloud and IT service providers, is ideally positioned to foster collaboration throughout the content journey, optimize monetization and deliver the infrastructure solutions organizations require to be future-ready, he said May 23 at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) at The Culver Theater, during  the session “Transforming Collaboration through Data Centers.”

The company has 30 data centers across the U.S., including three on a campus in Los Angeles, he noted. “What I’m going to talk about for the next 15 minutes is basically my job is to support some of the most demanding Hollywood customers in the world,” including small and medium-sized customers, the largest Hollywood movie studios and post-production companies, he told attendees.

CoreSite has a “giant data center basically in downtown Los Angeles, and it was built about 23 years ago,” he said. “And because of its proximity to Hollywood and Los Angeles over the last 23 years, we have acquired a lot of media and entertainment and content providers as customers inside of our data center. And what that means is they’ve chosen CoreSite to put their equipment so that if, God forbid, anything happened to their building [or] their headquarters from just one standpoint, if there was a disaster, they would be still operational and up and running because their equipment would be housed in a secure location that’s always up and running.”

Data centers, after all, have backup power and backup cooling, and “they never go down,” he said.

“CoreSite differentiates itself because we have a 100 percent uptime” rate, which basically “means if we ever go down for even a second, you’re getting a credit,:” he said. “That matters in the world of demanding customers who have no tolerance for latency or downtime or any nonsense.”

CoreSite designed the Los Angeles data center, “for the most part, to accommodate customers like yourselves, media and entertainment folks that have big data demands, that have big carrier demands, that have cloud requirements, that have hybrid cloud requirements, that have everything and anything in the world and need to stay current and need to stay future proof,” he pointed out.

What makes CoreSite “kind of sexy for the media and entertainment folks is, number one, we’ve got every major carrier inside of our building today, which means if you’ve got a requirement for a circuit to anywhere, there’s a carrier inside of CoreSite that can accommodate that request,” he told viewers.

Meanwhile, he went on to say: “In the world of Hollywood, where you all have these tricky needs where you’re filming in remote locations or you’re doing just unusual things, CoreSite has learned to kind of try to get our ecosystem focused on supporting the needs that you all have. So, for example, we’ve got every wireline. wireless satellite, content carrier again … inside of our building, so that anybody you might need for connectivity is already on that and can be turned up in 30 days or less.”

Growth of the Cloud

“The cloud emerged in a heavy way in the last kind of 10 years for the Hollywood folks,” Bamberg also said.

He told attendees: “A lot of my customers are using the cloud. In fact, they’re relying on the cloud and, even more so, they’re relying on multiple clouds to run their business. That’s a tricky requirement. The cloud [is not] turn the key, push and play. It’s complex to set up. It’s complex to maintain. The billing is tricky. And so, what we’ve done, in an attempt to make your lives easier, is we have created what we call the open cloud exchange, which, for lack of a better way to describe it, is just an ecosystem where every public and private cloud is just a click away or a cross connect away, and that would allow you to connect to Amazon, or Amazon and Azure, or Amazon, Azure and Google, or Amazon, Azure or Google and IBM…. We can handle the complexities that you guys are facing so that your life isn’t so hard. So that right there is another kind of reason why folks in this neck of the woods are choosing CoreSite.”

But he said the “biggest reason” why most of his customers have chosen CoreSite is “they want to connect to each other…. Every company has a supply chain. They have people that they need to send files back and forth to in order to operate and maintain their business. We’ve intended to get as many of those folks together in the same building as possible inside of CoreSite.”

Latency is significantly improved also, he went on to point out. And security is enhanced also, he said, noting: “Everybody needs to have a secure place for disaster recovery” and to put their equipment. “And also, inside of that environment is this ecosystem for everybody that you may connect [to] today or down the line is also inside CoreSite.”

This system is also going to “reduce your bill” significantly, he said.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and presented by Amazon Studios Technology, with sponsorship by Fortinet, Genpact, Prime Focus Technologies, Signiant, Softtek, Convergent, Gracenote, Altman Solon, AppTek, Ascendion, CoreSite, EPAM, MicroStrategy, Veritone, CDSA, EIDR and PDG Consulting.