George Blood LP has deployed EditShare’s high-performance Ultimate NVMe storage nodes to support expanding demand for its high resolution digitisation and restoration workflows.
George Blood with Julia Crowe, EditShare Regional Sales Manager with some of their historical recording equipment.
George Blood LP, a specialist in audio and video preservation, is meeting rapidly growing demand for its services. The company, which handles projects for broadcasters, universities, government agencies and cultural institutions worldwide, is now digitizing up to 50 terabytes of content daily, including 2K and 4K film scans along with high-volume audio transfers.
The company has deployed EditShare’s high-performance Ultimate NVMe storage nodes to power its expanding digitization and restoration workflows. The investment in the NVMe solution enables George Blood's team to keep up with client demand without sacrificing quality.
“We pushed the system as hard as we could, and we couldn’t break it,” said Jared Gibson, Video Team Lead at George Blood LP. “In stress tests we sustained 16 gigabytes per second in writes, well above our expectations, with total stability. While working with our previous SAN, we were constantly dropping frames and struggling to keep up. With EditShare, the bottlenecks are gone.”
Ultimate NVMe storage nodes reach extremely high speeds in a compact 24 NVMe drive 2U form factor with aggregate throughput exceeding 24GB/s per node, supporting high stream counts. This performance is largely due to the EFS Native Client, a multi-threaded network filesystem driver with ultra-low overhead and latency that can support direct, high-speed data transactions between EFS NVMe storage nodes and workstations running Windows, macOS, or Linux.
Optimised for efficiency to prevent delays in media workflows, the performance and resilience of the Ultimate NVMe haven’t been attainable with legacy protocols like SMB or NFS. Storage capacity is scalable, ranging from 192TB up to almost three-quarters of a petabyte in a single 2U node.
“George Blood LP is unique among the customers we’ve worked with,” said Julia Crowe, Regional Sales Manager, EditShare. “Their workflows are highly customised, and the fact that our storage slotted in and delivered the performance they needed shows how adaptable and powerful the system really is.”
Systems integrator Key Code Media led the installation with its New York team and continues to deliver ongoing service through its Key Code Total Care program. The system was validated within George Blood’s own infrastructure, including LaserGraphics and MWA film scanners, where EditShare consistently delivers the speed and reliability required for film digitization workflows. EditShare is the only storage vendor verified by LaserGraphics to handle the performance demands of its scanners.
The EditShare Ultimate NVMe Server is a good match for organisations like George Blood that work with high-resolution film scanners and need a real-time restoration system. The speed of the server allows high-resolution file-per-frame scans to be ingested directly from the scanner to EFS NVMe via 100GbE, simultaneously passing the material to post production software instances running on multiple workstations for editing and grading.
Beyond speed, EditShare’s NVMe systems emphasise efficiency and can support multiple users sharing one node to minimise hardware requirements and energy use. Less heat output, increased density and lower electricity consumption mean production studios can cut operational costs while maintaining quality levels
George Blood’s singular market position combines the ability to handle bulk digitisation with the high fidelity expected of specialist restoration houses. “We can take on a semi-truck of media and still deliver at the highest quality,” said George Blood, President of George Blood LP. “We’re proud to combine scale with the care these collections deserve, and EditShare has given us the infrastructure to keep growing.” editshare.com
