A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Located in Hollywood, California, The Post Group is part of the Post Start 2 Finish
family of companies, providing a complete range of high-quality, post production services. Operating from within its professional, state-of-the-art environment, The Post Group caters primarily to clients in the television and movie
industry, offering film scanning, film and digital dailies transfers, red dailies
processing and final color correction, compositing and visual effects, online
editorial finishing, off-line editorial and production and audio editing among
other services.
The Post Group
Location
Hollywood, California
Type of Business
Broadcast - Post Production
Business Needs
Improve customer service, eliminate
downtime and increase work throughput for
television and film post production editing and
finishing.
Solution
Avocent HMX extender system
Business Benefits
•Enhances customer service by allowing
the creation of more productive and
comfortable work environments for clients
and system operators
•Eliminates downtime by enabling
seamless switching to backup computers
when original computers go down
•Reduces costs and increases work
throughput by optimizing usage of
existing resources
In order to deliver the highest level of service and best possible experience for its
clients, The Post Group takes advantage of the Avocent HMX extender system,
allowing it to optimize usage of the company’s post production computer systems, increase system operator efficiency and maximize business profitability.
“The Avocent HMX system allows us to better serve
our clients, gives us faster throughput throughout our
facility, increases utilization of our resources, reduces
our costs and overall makes us a stronger company.”
– Bob Wilson, Director of Engineering, The Post Group
More Flexibility, Better Service
Spread throughout a 28,000-square-foot facility, The Post Group operates a
variety of post production and editing rooms designed to foster the productivity,
creativity and comfort of its clients. Central to the services provided by The Post
Group is a vast array of data processing equipment.
Rather than locating loud servers alongside monitors, keyboards and other
desktop-specific equipment in individual post production suites, The Post Group
IT team maintains all behind-the-scenes equipment in a centralized data center
or “machine room”. By locating hardware not essential to desktop function away
from the suites, The Post Group is able to maintain a specific atmosphere, conducive to creativity, in the production areas. In order to link each suite with the
machine room, The Post Group IT staff utilizes the Avocent HMX system, which
extends access to a keyboard, mouse and monitor in each room.
“We used to have million dollar rooms dedicated to one type of process,” says
Bob Wilson, Director of Engineering for The Post Group. “The HMX system from
Avocent has enabled us to create multi-purpose rooms that allow us to call up
different computers to do different processes, so we can be more flexible in our
resource usage and better serve our clients.”
A Customer Success
from the Experts in
Business-Critical ContinuityTM.
Lower Cost, Higher Satisfaction
Optimal Throughput and Resource Utilization
When The Post Group first consolidated its computing equipment in
a central machine room, it used a competing KVM solution to extend
computer access to post production suites. However, even though
the IT staff utilized another company’s “top-of-the-line” solution,
that product did not provide the necessary flexibility and reliability.
Each room had to be hard wired to a specific computer and processor,
preventing clients from accessing any other computer on the system.
As a result, if the computer they were using went down—or the KVM
switch stopped working (which happened frequently)—the client had
to gather up work and move to another suite.
In addition to eliminating downtime and improving customer service, the Avocent HMX extender system has enabled The Post Group
to tailor its post production rooms to the needs of its clients rather
than to the needs of a specific process. This also results in The Post
Group being able to better use existing computer systems as well as
cut down on the overall amount of systems needed.
“The Avocent HMX system lets us better share and utilize our computer resources, saving money and giving us greater throughput,”
Wilson says. “For a given process, an operator in one room might
only need a computer for a certain amount of time. When he’s done,
he can switch out of it, making it available to somebody else. That
gives us greater flexibility and higher throughput, so we can get
more work done without impacting people’s schedules.”
“At The Post Group, the customer is king,” says Randy Rike, the engineer responsible for deploying both the competing KVM solution and
then later the Avocent HMX system. “In our business, we really need
to pamper our clients. The last thing we want to do is ask the client to
pack up all their things and move to another room.”
Moving to another room not only inconvenienced the client, but it was
costly for The Post Group. A move to another room might take 30 to
60 minutes of time that would likely not be billable. But, the Avocent
HMX system solved that problem. Not only does the reliability of the
HMX system provide uninterrupted computer access, but if the computer being used happens to go down, the operator can immediately
switch to a different one.
“All the problems associated with the old way of doing things are now
gone,” Wilson says. “If we lose a computer, we can still stay in the
room. With the Avocent HMX system we can just switch to another
computer without experiencing any downtime. We can also call up different processes provided by other computers, like adding additional
peripheral gear, switching color correctors or switching film gear. The
Avocent HMX system lets us be much more flexible, letting us seamlessly transition between different systems.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how happy our editors and machine room
staff members have been with the Avocent HMX system,” Rike adds.
“If an editor has to switch computers while assisting a client, there is
no noted downtime, keeping both the editor and the client happy.”
“Our editors really love the HMX extender system,” Wilson adds.
“They might be accessing one of the editing machines from a room
and decide to look at another project. They can quickly switch to
another computer and call up that project. They can even switch
back and forth, working on different projects at the same time. The
flexibility to swap tools and computers so easily really excites them
and makes them much more productive.”
Another advantage The Post Group has enjoyed since implementing
the Avocent HMX extender system is how it simplifies maintenance
of computers and the storage area network (SAN).
“In the past, if something went wrong with the SAN, we’d have to
walk up to each computer and manually power cycle them,” Wilson
says. “Now we can just sit at one station and reboot them remotely.
The HMX system just makes it so easy to manage all our computers
on the network.”
In summarizing all the benefits The Post Group enjoys by using the
Avocent solution, Wilson says, “The Avocent HMX system allows us
to better serve our clients, gives us faster throughput throughout
our facility, increases utilization of our resources, reduces our costs
and overall makes us a stronger company. We’ve been extremely
impressed with the HMX system as well as Avocent as a company.”
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