I'm Matt Schneider from LucidLink. I'm based in Brooklyn, New York City as we were just talking about. Welcome everyone to LucidLink unlocked.
Today, we are talking about the gold standard of enterprise storage with AWS, and we're delighted to welcome Edward Churchward from Arch.
Edward was kind enough to join us in our booth at NAB last week and we're just as delighted to have him, on the show here today, on on log to talk about what Arch is, what the Arch platform is, and how it forms this very complimentary relationship with LucidLink and s, AWS storage. And we're also gonna talk a little bit about our recent announcement, our our availability, LucidLink availability, on the AWS marketplace.
Alright. So, again, welcome. What is unlocked? If you're new to this series, talk a little bit about what it is and what to expect.
This is a live event series presented by LucidLink. This is an inside look at how LucidLink can transform how you work without requiring you to change anything else. The great thing about LucidLink and the partners that we work with is you get to work the way you want to work with the workflows that are known and familiar without any requirement of changing those workflows or changing your tools. So we bring known known familiar workflows and tools, but over distance.
And and we do so in real time, and this really empowers real time collaboration, safely and securely.
Again, I'm welcoming, my colleague David Phillips, senior solutions engineer from LucidLink based out of, Minnesota, as well as Edward Churchward, cofounder and CTO of Arch out of LA.
If you're not familiar with LucidLink, I'll quickly talk about what LucidLink is. We are a storage collaboration platform. We are designed for creative workflows. You put your heavy media files in the LucidLink cloud, but we look like and present just like a regular hard drive. But But perhaps more importantly, we we provide the performance of a regular hard drive, which means you get real time collaboration with your team no matter where they are, eliminating the need for downloading and transferring and syncing and creating duplicate copies of media, which really breaks collaborative workflows, create security concerns, and really introduces the absence of familiarity, not preserving familiarity in creative workflows.
So it is real time collaboration.
It's instant access to shared files from anywhere. Your onboarding time, for example, if you wanted to onboard a freelance creative and the data is already uploaded to LucidLink, that onboarding time is effectively zero. So it's very easy to scale your team up or down, and we do so safely and securely.
We, as I said at the beginning of this session, last week was NAB twenty twenty five in Las Vegas. And, we're all glowing because we won our fourth consecutive product of the year, so everybody is really excited about that. And, it was great to have Edward in the booth with us representing Arch.
We launched this, relationship back in November of twenty twenty four when we launched the brand new, LucidLink version three point o. All new accounts in the new LucidLink are based on AWS high performance, all in one pricing, zero egress storage. Sorry. That's a mouthful.
But what that means is there's one price that you pay. There are no egress fees, no additional unpredictable charges. And one of the things that was new that we talked about at NAB was the introduction of LucidLink's availability on the AWS Marketplace. We're gonna talk about what that means here and what is Marketplace and why it's beneficial to customers and to prospects and in particular to enterprise customers.
My colleague David is gonna talk a little bit about what does marketplace mean and how it plays a role in this whole discussion.
We have a great new blog article on our website, that talks about not only the, AWS as a whole, but also what, the marketplace availability really means, for us and more importantly, for our partners and for our customers.
That is the URL if you're curious to check it out.
And speaking of marketplace, Edward is also on the marketplace.
Arch is on the marketplace, and customers can procure through the marketplace the Arch platform. And so at this point, I think I'm ready to turn over the baton, to Edward who's gonna talk about what is Arch, and what does it do, and what value does it bring to to his customers and to our customers in common. So with that note, I think I'm gonna stop sharing my screen, Edward, and let you take the baton.
Thank you, Matt. To be clear, you cannot buy me on marketplace. I am not available.
I am available for kids' birthday parties and bar mitzvahs, but not for the marketplace. So what is Arch, and why do we work so well with LucidLink? And why has LucidLink been a really important
product for us in able to grow and support the types of workflows that companies are looking to, use in AWS? So what Arch is is an orchestration platform that deploys content creation studios in AWS.
We only work with AWS. We can deploy globally, and we are supporting both fully cloud native workflows, but also a lot of workflows are hybrid. Not all companies work entirely in the cloud, and we need to be able to support those workflows. So, of course, there are plenty of different types of storage available in AWS.
You think of, like, FSx for Windows, FSx ONTAP, Qumulo, etcetera, all excellent storage products, but none of them enable us to have that workflow where users can log in to secure cloud workstations in a corporate environment inside the customer's AWS accounts, do those high end content creation workflows, be it, you know, three d with Unreal or editorial where the content is stored securely in the AWS account, and then allow the additional teams within the business who don't need those powerful workstations to immediately access that content. So I'm gonna give you a quick overview of the Arch platform, and then I'm gonna show you LucidLink in action with a workstation running in Oregon and a workstation running in London.
So let me just share my screen.
So what you should be able to see here is just our dashboard.
Our dashboard is really the way that the user accesses the workstations. And I'm logged in as an administrator, so I see everything. But this is the, environment that we set up for the NAB booth for LucidLink. And when their users logged in, all they got access to were the NAB workstations. They didn't see the additional ones up above here.
We orchestrate into the customer's AWS account, so we are not providing some form of SaaS service where you're having to log into a workstation that lives in our account. This is all done in your AWS account. Now the advantage of this is you get to control the security in your account, and, also, you get to, have your own relationship with AWS. So if you've got any private pricing agreements or if you've got any credits or anything else, you can benefit from those and build that relationship with AWS to bring your costs down.
We do that using, what's called an API gateway, and a private link. We do not deploy our platform into your account. We do not want things running in your account that may be considered out of date or insecure. We orchestrate everything from our account, but we orchestrate it securely into yours. You can see on the right here, we have two different facilities. We've got London and the West Coast.
These are the sort of air the AWS regions that we deployed into. And you can see inside here that we have the workstations running inside here, and we've got one running in Oregon.
We're doing this through what's called an image pipeline. One of the things people struggle with when working with remote workflows is, how do I manage those workstations? How do I make sure the software's up to date? How do I make sure that people are all running on the same version of the software? And how do I patch manage everything? Well, we do this through what we call our image pipeline.
The image pipeline generates the images that are used for your workstations, and I'm focusing heavily on workstations here, but it doesn't necessarily need to be only workstations. It could be iconic storage gateways, which is another partner of LucidLink and ours, which can help with workflows with your MAM workflows. It could be ShotGrid Event daemon servers. It could be render nodes.
It could be a whole host of different things. So very simple one here, we start with this base Windows pipeline, which is doing things like installing the NVIDIA drivers and installing roaming profiles, but then we get on to the application pipeline. So you can see here that we are installing LucidLink as part of this image pipeline and also some other applications, so, After Effects and Media Encoder and Premiere Pro and Blender and Nuke and there's over seven hundred and fifty different applications which are fully orchestrated. Now I did say that this is a relatively simple image pipeline.
I could show you, something which is a little more indicative of what we might see with our customers, if I just pop into here.
So you can see this is this is a real workflow going downstream. So you can see that you start with your Windows, you go to your standard applications, which are much like what I showed you before, everything like Microsoft Office, and then you start going into your global CGI workflows, which is Maya, V Ray, Nu, Houdini, and different versions of Python. But you could also downstream from these standard applications to a simpler workflow, which is like the design and retouching workflow. So those things can be very helpful when creating the unique workflows that work globally for your, for your company.
So if I just pop back in here, when you go into the workstations themselves, you're gonna see metrics and just get given an overview of sort of what's going on with it. So these workstations would all have LucidLink running on them.
If I just, give my Internet a little kick here.
So we're gonna get metrics. So here I can see the latency that I've got on the connection coming through to the workstation. I can see what's the CPU utilization, memory, disk swap, etcetera. And if I wanted to build a new workstation, I could just click the plus button.
I could, choose what type of workstation I would want. So I can choose one of our workstations, choose who wants to see it. So I'm gonna make sure it's in our group here, and click launch. We support both Windows and Linux with LucidLink, so we can have either or running in the cloud depending on your type of workflow.
And we also extensively deploy render farms using Deadline ten and Deadline Cloud, of which LucidLink is an integral part to that because, of course, if you're working with LucidLink and you've got all your content there, you want those render nodes to be reading from those same mount points.
So I'm gonna switch to screen just for a second because I wanna show you LucidLink in action.
So let me just stop sharing that.
These things might be a little bit small. So what I've got here is two different workstations. I've got, this workstation here. This is, Oregon, so it's running out of the United States, and this workstation here is in London.
So two different parts of the globe. They are both on a shared file system, and I will show you that LucidLink is mounted as part of, these systems here. So you'll see on the left hand side, we've got the l drive, which is LucidLink, and that is how it mounts by default. You can choose where that is.
We also take advantage of the high speed NVMe that are on these workstations and point the LucidLink cache to there. Working with LucidLink in the cloud when you are in your own AWS account and that s three bucket is in AWS as well is incredibly performant. The latency is is is almost negligible, and you have a twenty five gig NIC on the workstation, a hundred gig backbone, and LucidLink is excellent at multithreading, those blocks out of it. So data really flies at a very, very high speed.
So what we've got on this workstation in Oregon, we'll see if I just launch, Explorer. You'll see again we've got that L drive.
And inside here, we've got the renders, and three d renders, which there is nothing in there. So what I'm gonna do here, we've got Blender. We've just got a very simple scene set up for Blender, and I'm going to render out this scene. So if I just click render animation, what you'll see is these frames, they're quite low res for the purposes of this demo, And you'll see these frames are immediately appearing obviously on this local computer.
But if I switch over to the London machine, you will see that these frames are appearing now in London here. So I can double click on here, and I will be able to load up that frame in London almost instantaneously. So you can see how that empowers a global workflow. That data has never left the AWS backbone.
It has never hit the public Internet. It has traveled from an s three bucket inside your AWS account over the VPCs, using an s three endpoint in both regions. There is no egress. As Matt alluded to before, there is this new package from LucidLink, which means that even if you have a laptop locally, you are still not paying egress out of date AWS, which is a complete game changer for the way that you can think about and use that storage.
So that just goes to show the speed of which you can create a global workflow using Arch, the security that you are gonna get around that. The data has never hit the public Internet. It stays within your environment, and, obviously, the speed at which it's coming across there.
So moving back to, the way that we're working within Arch, obviously, we have full roaming profiles. One of the most important things for end users is you want an artist or a creative, someone to be able to sit down and get to work. You don't want them to have to learn a new way of working with a computer, and that is one of the nice things about Lucid. It is just mounted as a drive on a computer.
It acts exactly as you would want it to act as a normal file system. The user would know no different. You can use single sign on. So you can single sign on into the Arch platform.
You can single sign on into LucidLink, and, that all makes for a very familiar experience for that end user.
So I think I wanna throw it out a little bit to to the audience and also to David here, to sort of, talk a bit further about LucidLink and, and and how we've been using it together.
Yeah. Thanks, Edward. Yeah. I mean, you know, one thing that I think that we're so excited about, not only being on the AWS platform, but being partnered with, companies like Arch is that the bit well, the, you know, the big benefit of, LucidLink on AWS is you get that just consistent performance, you know, and that consistent network, bandwidth and availability and service availability.
I mean, you know, when we talk about in the high in the headline of AWS being the gold standard, it is that, you know, they basically invented, you know, this kind of modern, cloud storage and API and that, you know, they have been refining this for, you know, for many, many years at this point. So it really you know, as far as the consistency and the data protection and the availability, and the bandwidth that is available in all of those data center regions, you know, it that that is what you want as that kind of, like, eleven nines of kind of availability. You know, it's a backing store for your file system.
And I think, David, the the other thing to know is is the zero knowledge LucidLink has around that data itself?
Yeah. Yeah. And that's and that's and that's the other key benefit that now with with all the power and capability of AWS, we like to think of, LucidLink as the kind of easy on ramp to cloud workflows, cloud based workflows, cloud based, data file systems.
Now we are well, you know, we use client side encryption, in order to when you write a file to LucidLink, the client side is encrypting that data with the customer's private encryption key. We don't have access to that key and neither does AWS.
So, you know, that kind of end to end encryption and security and that zero knowledge, gives organizations the kind of peace of mind that, you know, they really do have, that there's nobody who can kind of get in and access their data, neither LucidLink nor the cloud storage provider.
And the the exciting thing about, you know, like, partnering with Arch is that, again, all of the power and capability of the AWS, service portfolio, I like to, you know, I often liken it to, like, the most incredible, like, set of LEGO bricks you've ever seen.
But if you want to put together the Millennium Falcon, you've gotta be a master builder.
Platforms like Arch, you know, allow just, you know, any organization without a lot of, like, without years of AWS and cloud kind of, design experience to to basically deploy desktops, creative workstations, servers, render farms, and things like that using all of the, you know, best practices, all the the pillars, you know, that AWS, recommends as far as security, cost optimization, you know, kind of accessibility.
All of that basically just, again, makes it the easy on ramp to bursting workflows into the cloud, kind of connecting global talent, to creative projects no matter where they, may be. And it's it's the the ability to just quickly spin up a creative workstation with all of the data is ready to go, all of the applications are ready to go, and the artist can immediately get to work.
Consistency is a really important feature of this because you have data consistency with LucidLink globally. But, also, with the Arch platform, you get application consistency, which I'm sure if you've used the Adobe Creative Suite, you will know how quickly Adobe like to update their products. And so quickly, you can get drift with your product versions that you're running in your workstations, and you'll someone will open up with a newer version of Premiere or a newer version of After Effects, and then someone else will come in to try and collaborate on that project, and they put an older version, and they won't be able to update it.
With the Arch platform, you can lock those things in, so you're getting that application consistency across with the data consistency that LucidLink offers. And the the remote teams is is so important. Although both LucidLink and Arch come out of the m and e background, which is where we sort of cut our teeth in understanding how to deal with these types of workflows, we're seeing much, much, more interest in these platforms from outside the that particular industry vertical, although with very similar workflow. So the, you know, Adobe and Autodesk and Avid and so forth.
But if you think about a marketing agency or you think about a, an engineering firm, which may also generate marketing content around their products and so forth, You've got those high powered workflows that are required, but you don't need to log in to a high powered cloud workstation necessarily to work on a PowerPoint presentation or to check your Outlook email. But those users who are working on those PowerPoint presentation need access to the content. And with LucidLink, that that content can be generated in the cloud on high powered workstations with almost limitless render farms and then immediately get access to those marketing teams, those communication teams that need access to that using LucidLink.
And so it can be a very powerful tool for corporations. And, obviously, also enabling, remote workflows, remote workers, so people who don't necessarily have to come into the office. The talent isn't always where your office is. Right? And you don't want to ship a drive to them, right, and have your precious co corporate data sitting on an external hard drive. And you don't necessarily want that data living on their computer locally.
Right? But with LucidLink, one, you can have it just going directly to their computer if you wished, or you could have it going to a cloud workstation so it's secure within your AWS account. And the nice thing is is when you revoke access, when you remove that user from the SAML, they immediately lose that data. That data may sit on their local hard drive, but it's fully encrypted. And if they do not got access to LoosyLink anymore, there's nothing they can do with it. So you get real control over where your data lives and who can access it when. So I think that's a it's it's a really key feature to being able to use these platforms successfully.
Edward, one thing I Absolutely.
Sorry, David. I was gonna I'm glad you mentioned this because one thing that we've noticed with both customers and prospects is that there's this common misconception that workflows in the cloud or leveraging cloud resources is an all or nothing thing. You're either entirely on prem or you're entirely in the cloud. And making that leap is this massive rejiggering of resources and educating talent in how to work.
But I think we know that that's not the case, that both LucidLink and Arch allow workflows to really scale whether they're in a traditional office environment or they're they're remote. So in some respects, it's almost not accurate to describe a workflow as on prem because they still could be using cloud based resources even if they're in a brick and mortar facility Yeah.
Which really kind of eliminates this kind of multi siloed approach that, unfortunately, we've all been living with for about a decade. Do you have customers who are doing exactly this where they may be predominantly in a brick and mortar environment? They also have freelance talent, for example, but they're relying exclusively on the Arch platform and LucidLink to really kind of make that line blurry or even invisible.
Very much so. And and they can also like, if you've got an office space and you've got a data, center within your office space, we've seen customers dramatically reduce the size of their on premise data center by being able to get rid of their central storage, by being able to reduce the complexity of what they've got, free up office space, free up real estate, bring in more desks, right, but also enabling them to have that workflow where they're not needing to pay all these big electricity bills, the big air conditioning bills, and potentially not having as many IT resources on-site, right, who can who who need to be there to manage that data center.
And and so with LucidLink, they can have a cloud based storage platform. They can have cloud based workstations with Arch, and they can enable those their users to, access what they need. And I think it's also important to note with Arch, you can use our dashboard to access your on premise workstations alongside your cloud one. So it's a single pane of glass that a user can go to.
So as a company, you can say, okay. I've reached my twenty person limit, and they are utilizing all of my own twenty on premise. Now I'm gonna burst five more cloud workstations, which are all connected because they've got LucidLink installed. So the person is not gonna really notice any difference.
They're gonna log in there. They're gonna get it, and you can burst into the cloud really easily, and users just come to one place every morning to access their their resources. So, yeah, it's it's it's a really important and powerful workflow.
When your prospective customers are learning about you initially, they've never bumped into you before, they have kind of an inkling about maybe what it is that you do, In general, how long does it take? What is the onboarding time? I mean, my perception is it's pretty quick, but if somebody is just getting started with Arch, let's say they already have LucidLink, they've they've, made that lead. Now they were using LucidLink for both on prem and remote workflows.
They wanna spin up these virtual machines. Yeah. What's their onboarding time? How long does that take?
So after the initial conversation, I mean, we can get an entire environment built in under an hour, fully orchestrated and fully automated. So if you gave us, if if we we would onboard the, initial phase of the platform into your AWS account in a shared call, which normally takes around five minutes, and then we would start the build out process. And it does obviously depend on the complexity. If you're talking about a small independent, then that can be literally that quick.
If you're talking about a large corporate enterprise, it can be longer because we have to go through their, identity teams, their active directory teams because we can deploy into a customer's account and connect into all of their existing resources. So if they have an on prem AD that they need these machines joining or a cloud AD or if they've got Okta or Entra that we need the identity provider, synced in with with with SAML and both SCIM provisioning. So those things can take longer because, for the people on the call who are part of those larger enterprise, you know what it's like wrangling those teams, getting them in order.
But the actual once that is in place, the actual automation and orchestration portion of it is very quick. There can just be it's it's always humans that get in the way of everything. So if we could just remove them from the equation, it would be much faster.
I I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah.
I was also interested by, your note earlier that beyond m and e, there's other market verticals that are really discovering just how incredibly useful and efficient and ultimately cost effective this is. Can you talk a little bit more about who else is using this, and where are you sort of finding unexpected interest for this kind of scalable compute?
Yeah. So, I mean, I think things like industries such as engineering and construction have been really good for us. We have quite a few engineering firms coming on board. Not only do they have, large teams working on the actual engineering products and and designs that they're working on, But, again, going back to those marketing teams, there's huge communication, teams built around that, which are either communicating internally to their global workforce as what's being worked on and what products are coming out or externally through social media channels and just, PR channels, automotive and, energy, big sectors, and also sort of m and e adjacent.
So, video games industry has been, video games industry has been really important. And, also, the marketing and advertising industries have become really important, because they are also working on large editorial workflows. They generate an awful, awfully large amount of content, being pushed out via their social media channels and via advertising. And and this is a way of centralizing their workflow, centralizing their source, and centralizing the IT management of the types of applications that they wanna work with.
So, yeah, lots of different types.
Did I hear you correctly that you can spin up how many different kind of applications and creative tools?
It was a So we have over seven hundred and fifty, already built into the platform, and we're adding new ones daily.
Obviously, companies like the Foundry have, companies like the Foundry have new applications being launched almost daily and new versions, so we're always keeping up to date with those. But yeah. So you look at everything from, Autodesk, the Foundry, Adobe, Blackmagic, Avid, and then you're looking at some of the, like, construction firms with, like, Schlumberger and Leica and Bosch and those sort of companies where we're adding things. So, really, there's a whole plethora of sort of applications which are being added and fully automated into the platform.
Going back to your point about the onboarding, you know, some of the questions which which people have is, like, they've been working on prem for twenty years, and what we find is you have really talented IT teams, right, with amazing domain expertise. That doesn't mean that they're cloud orchestration experts. Right? But you don't want to lose that. You know, the the the they really, really should be part of that business, decision making. So we try and remove the cloud orchestration part just like you do with your storage, right, and enable them to use the product, which are all those LEGO blocks combined into the Millennium Falcon. Right?
Yeah.
So that's what you want to enable people to do and get back to the real task of actually letting people use technology with technology kinda getting out of the way for them. But one of the interesting things we find is when you have these legacy workflows, which have been working on premise for sort of twenty years, you come to these things where they're using licensing and they're still using sort of USB dongles to license their applications. Often, it's the case that you can just sort of say, hey. Let's just talk to the manufacturer and upgrade your licensing model to, like, a user based licensing like Adobe or Autodesk are now doing or a floating license model because we can spin up floating license servers.
Or, you can do USB redirections. So you think about all the peripherals you need to be able to do these content creation workflows, whether it's, one of the Blackmagic desks or whether it's, just a Wacom tablet. You know, all these USB redirections can work. So you can still persist with those USB dongles.
That's actually a source of skepticism we sometimes hear from the customer base when it comes to cloud. Like, alright. You put your data in the cloud. I can I can get my head around that?
And you put the workstation in the cloud. Alright. I can get my head around that too. But what about the external client monitor, the Wacom tablet, other peripherals that, you know, are a little bit more centric to the m and e perspective, but there are other boxes and tools that kind of, represent the entire suite of tools for a creative.
That is entirely possible still. Correct?
Very much so. Yeah. I mean, there's things like, HP Anywhere and NICE TCV and POS, like, all have forms of USB redirection. We see a lot of growth in education as well, which is I know an area that LucidLink, serves very well too.
And those are often really a key tool in those education, procedures where they build up those labs. They have a lot of peripherals. They wanna train the students up on the different types of peripherals that they might be coming across in their in their later careers, and USB redirection is is absolutely an integral part. And then you talk about color color workflows and over the shoulder editorial workflows where you might have an SDI out traditionally on an on prem environment.
There are plenty of different options with CDI from AWS, with Streambox, with I'm missing a whole host, so excuse me. But there's loads of options out there of how to get color accurate reference monitors powered from a cloud workstation.
Fantastic. And, of course, kind of unifying all of this, the connective tissue, so to speak, other than LucidLink and Arch itself is AWS storage. And one of the things that we are talking about now that we're both talking about, is marketplace. And as I said at the beginning of our session, LucidLink is now available on the AWS marketplace. When I heard of this initiative, my first reaction was, what does that mean? What exactly is that? And so, David, I actually wanna ask you, can you explain what is marketplace?
Why is it a benefit to customers and prospects, of both Arch and LucidLink, and why, you know, why does it matter?
Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things the key benefits is that, if you've already got a, you know, kind of services running in AWS, if you've already got an AWS account, you know, and no matter what the scale, it just makes it essentially, procurement that much easier. When you have larger scales, you know, kind of enterprise scale, organizations that have, you know, a lot of AWS usage.
The procurement aspect, you know, also just makes it very easy, to acquire, you know, both LucidLink and Arch because they don't have to have to go through a whole, you know, procurement, you know, kind of vendor, assessment and kind of procurement onboarding, you know, that they might have to do otherwise. So it makes it much easier to purchase.
The other benefit is that, you know, again, if you've got a, you know, investment in AWS, meaning you've got a, you know, kind of a a a contract with AWS, typically, you're you're kind of, part of that contract is having, you know, credits that you are kind of expire you know, kind of, burning down, you know, through through usage and everything like that. So buying through the marketplace allows you to kind of, kind of expire those credits, you know, and and apply it towards that. So the, it just kind of, you know, makes everything, a little bit easier both from, like, you know, kind of actually purchasing as well as just, plugging into the whole system.
I mean, I do wanna kind of quickly point out one of the additional things that we're excited about being on AWS and having the storage on AWS, not only just the s three service itself, but the all of the other service portfolio that it unlocks connecting to, which, I mean, is in the hundreds, you know, currently and growing seems to be growing more every every month. They keep adding more services. Things that everybody really, you know, kind of wants, things like AI and and machine learning, analysis, in addition to just the traditional transcoding or audio transcription, things like that, you know, OCR, being able to really tap into this kind of very vast and rich portfolio of of, you know, data services, media services, and just in, you know, in, of course, all the compute services that are, Edward is describing, is those are some of the things that we're really excited about.
And with with with just to highlight a point and going back to one of Matt's questions is how long does it take to onboard. When you are talking with enterprises that have relationships with AWS, if you can circumvent the procurement team and then also massively reduce the overall cost of both LucidLink and Arch by going through marketplace because you are using those prebought credits, which are, within AWS. Some of times of which with these, agreements, you have to spend through marketplace. So they will apportion out.
Right? These credits can be apportioned to e c two. You need to spend this much through, ProServe, which is the managed services thing, and and then this has to go through Marketplace. So, really, you can really reduce your overall cost and time to, deployment by going through something like Marketplace.
Yeah.
And the other thing you sorry, David.
I was gonna say, the the metaphor that I've, heard a few times is it's like a prepaid prepaid credit card. You've already put a hundred bucks on that card. You wanna swipe that card and leverage the money you've already spent rather than spending professional, level and at scale.
Yeah. And on the the storage side and, as it relates to LucidLink, you know, file spaces and, you know, we are we have positioned ourselves as we are a solution for active work in progress, production storage. You know? You've got two or two hundred, you know, creative artists and users who are, you know, collaborating on, you know, creative projects or, you know, whatever vertical it may be. You know? Any any where you need to have, like, a central dataset that everybody is kind of accessing and and collaborating on, like the architecture and, construction that, Edward was mentioning.
Now once you get done with that project, depending on, you know, the organization and and the industry and, you know, the the life cycle of that project, a lot of times, you know, it's like you want you don't want to immediately just, like, archive it off and, you know, kind of delete it from the active production storage.
You may need to keep it around. You know? You may need to be referring to it for three months, six months. You may need to go back and reference that project twelve months later.
If not, like, pull assets, you know, for revision customer comes back and says, hey. You know, campaign from last year, we wanna do a a new version of it, and we just need to update it. You know? We need to kinda pull from that.
So having a single namespace where things can, you know, be active production, storage, hot storage as it were, but, you know, but you can you don't have to immediately kind of move it off because you're concerned about, again, cost optimization kind of kind of rightsizing your storage tiers. But one of the things that we're excited about is introducing, this year, later this year, dynamic tiering, where as that project data cools off, you just can let it you don't have to, manage it. You don't have to manually migrate it, tier it, backup it, you know, archive it. You can, it can cool off in place, and you get the advantage of it starts to as it cools down, you know, you get it gets lower pricing tiers so that you don't have that kind of, urgency to manage the storage, which is you know, most artists, most creatives, and even most, you know, kind of, producers, storage management, asset management is not their favorite part of the, the job.
They like being creative. They like, you know, the the the collaboration and creating new things, all that kind of housekeeping, you know, sometimes in the speed of productions, and then now you're on to the next production gets kind of can fall to the wayside, because, you know, unless you've got, like, a dedicated team that's, you know, immediate asset managers.
Most teams, you know, don't.
But, you know, having an automated mechanism that allows you the that data to kind of cool off over time and then get priced at a different, pricing tier over time is something that we're excited to bring to market.
And I think it's also worth noting with that That's right. With the dynamic tiering is most people say, oh, but if I put it into Glacier, I'm gonna get charged loads of money for pulling it out of Glacier, and I'm not even gonna know. That doesn't apply to dynamic tiering.
AWS do not charge you. As it as it goes down, it can't go to Deep Glacier, but it can go all the way down. As you pull it out, there is no additional charge to pull it back out. So it's like you don't need to be concerned about unnecessary bills coming out of the fact you're pulling data out of a lower tier.
Yeah. Great point.
And then, you know, just for for the artist, you know, basically having it still in that global namespace.
They don't have to go to another system to, like, bind and restore, past assets.
Traditional archival workflows usually require what a dear colleague of mine likes to refer to as the giant shovel, where you have to giant shovel a fair amount of media from, more expensive storage to less expensive storage either because you're freeing up space if you're still in the on prem model or you simply need to manage costs and you don't know when you're gonna need this data again.
Not only do you have to giant shovel the data back, when you need it again or you're not sure if you need it but you have to pick through it to see what you're gonna need, there's usually a fair amount of cleanup required. When you move the data back, it may not land in the identical folder structure that it was in previously, which means if it lands in a slightly different folder structure, that means you're going into your creative tool, whether it's a video editing tool or color or visual effects or whatever the platform is, the data structure, the folder structure is identical with dynamic tiering because the data never left in the first place. It does not go anywhere. It's physically in the same spot. There's no action required on the part of the end user.
The customer is simply paying less automatically after a certain period of inactivity, and that's what dynamic tiering is. So we're not eliminating the need to do a like a backup copy. That's just best practices. That's something that everybody should do, But we are lessening the need for some of these more traditional archival workflows. We are pushing a lot of data from point a to point b, really just for the purposes of managing costs.
So we're pretty excited about dynamic tiering, and it's expected later this year. So Excellent.
On that front, I think, we may, be open to some q and a.
I have a question in the meantime, if that's alright. Please.
How do you most often see so, like, obviously, Arch, LucidLink, and AWS work together. How how do you often see people start to use one of those and then use the others? Like, is there a classic
progression of those things, or,
how does that typically work?
Well, I think from our point of view, when we when we come to a customer and it is a good question. When we come to a customer, we try and listen to them and understand their workflows and what they're trying to achieve by going into the cloud.
And we bring to the table different options and different solutions because we are not here to prescribe how they work. And one of the great things about working with LucidLink is they've given us the ability to offer customers demo, POCs of LucidLink alongside a POC with Arch, so they get to test that out and see whether it's applicable. And we have a great uptake from that type of workflow. So I think what we often see is it comes hand in hand. It's rare that someone will migrate away. We have seen it where workflows have slightly changed, and they've gone from a persistent cloud storage solution and migrated over to LucidLink because their workflows have either spread globally or their workflows have gone they they need more access to that central storage in the cloud. So from an Arch point of view, it sort of starts with Arch and then we work out and LucidLink is often the solution which follows.
And the the opposite effect is is also true. Someone may be interested in LucidLink, but they're also not exactly sure. So LucidLink is the collaborative storage that kind of connects the dots and allows creatives of any industry to work together in a way that is familiar. And sometimes when people start to learn about LucidLink in particular when they're learning about cloud storage workflows for the first time, they may have trouble visualizing exactly, well, how does this work for real human beings who are doing creative work?
And LucidLink is kind of an invisible thing. In fact, when we are at our best, we are invisible by design. Our our purpose is really to stay out of the kitchen and just ensure that the data gets to the creative in a real time way so that they can do what they need to do. And so a platform like Arch is fantastic for our prospective customers because it's putting an actual creative user interface right smack in the middle of the discussion.
And it's since it's so easy to spin up and so easy to deploy and so easy to get started, it really puts some kind of a a human face to it. A color correction tool, a video editing tool, something that is known and familiar, and something that really brings the promise of cloud workflows, front and center. So that's something that we really appreciate about, about working with Arch.
Awesome. And it looks like we do have a couple questions from Rich in the chat.
Edward, can you show an a sample of using a program in Arch importing media from LucidLink to edit? And can Edward also talk about viewing the media on a local grading monitor?
Yes. Rich, hi. Great questions. I am no editor. I will tell you that for free. I'll be very, very happy to get you on board with one of our workflow specialists who'd be able to show you those types of workflows live, and it works very well. There's also, I believe, and LucidLink might wanna talk more about this.
There is an Adobe panel for LucidLink Mhmm.
Which sits in which gives the editors, I think, access directly to the file space through within the panel.
Yeah. And, yeah, we developed that specifically, because for customers who are working with high bit rate video, let's say, original camera, you know, source footage, the kind of, like, raw files and things like that, that high bit rate video, typically, you don't have the the bandwidth, especially if you're working on prem, you're working on, like, consumer, Internet. And so the pinning that high resolution source footage in your Lucid Lake cache, which can be expanded to terabytes of, you know, dedicated flash, cache storage, Pinning those high that source footage allows you to kinda get that real time playback.
We have many customers who'll have a DaVinci Resolve color grading workstation for, for color grading and finishing, and they will have a dedicated, you know, sometimes, you know, four terabytes or more of of flash, LucidLink cache that they will pin all of that source footage. Let's say they have a supervised session starting tomorrow morning. They can pin it, you know, before the session, when that session starts, supervised session. They're getting kind of that real time, playback and and color grading performance, and, you know, that really speeds the, speeds the process.
So that Adobe panel, right now for just Adobe Premiere and After Effects. But, again, same situation where Premiere video editors and, kind of, artists in After Effects can pin that high resolution media and get kind of that fast perform performance.
So so, Rich, your your second question, which is about grading on monitors working obviously from a cloud workstation. So when you're connecting to the cloud workstation, obviously, you are using something like, Amazon's DCV, which can do four four four color, but it's not necessarily what you want when you're plugging into a color grading monitor. So depending on your editorial application, for example, if it was Resolve, Resolve had their own way of streaming out, the color accurate stream. So that would be independent of using something like an iTCB or HP Anywhere.
And then we've done that going back to, like, a DeckLink card, which sits on premise, which goes to your color accurate monitor. We've used, Stream Box, which is a third party service where people can do everything from your color accurate monitor all the way streaming directly to sort of an iPad Pro where you've got directors who wanna sit looking at an iPad Pro when they're on set doing color accurate reference material. So I think it really does depend on which DCC applications you're using to do your grading, and, what your setup is. But they are all very much possible within the worlds of, working in the cloud.
And the good news there is that, connecting external grading monitors, thankfully, is is not a new configuration. You know, five years ago when the pandemic began, that was a real tough thing for, in general, post production facilities to to figure out, in particular, not only how to get the the media stream from a cloud point of origin to a grading monitor, but also how to deal with some of the latencies that are introduced when you're taking an inbound stream and you're converting it to SDI, you're converting it to HDMI or whatever the physical interface is.
At this point now, most of the methods of streaming high quality video imagery like four four four imagery, as as Edward said, to a physical, color critical display is most most of those wrinkles have been ironed out. So that's a lot of our customers that are doing exactly that. I think the post production house, for example, that I used to work for in New York, they're using LeoStream. That that gets deployed quite a bit, in some of these workflows. So it's absolutely something that can be used, with Arch as the as the platform and LoosLink as the collaborative storage.
Yeah. And somewhat related, not specifically to that kind of, you know, color and finishing and everything like that. But at NAB, we had another partner, LiveView, you know, demonstrating we have a lot of common customers who are doing that live ingest of, you know, be it sporting, kind of entertainment, you know, kind of out in the field, live events, streaming that, via live view ingest encoders to a LucidLink file space, which then you can have essentially editors, anywhere in the world who are viewing and, clipping and editing those growing files from that live ingest.
So it's it's yet another very specific workflow, but, you know, those stations could also be in the cloud because you can essentially, once you have you can mount the LucidLink file space anywhere. You know? So you can have editors on prem. You can have cloud workstations that are all working, and viewing these growing files from a, live recording.
We have a LucidLink specific question here. Does LucidLink still use some some kind of mounting protocol under the hood?
So I think what you're referring to is in LucidLink Classic, which is our our legacy product, still very much in use today, version two dot nine or earlier.
What I think you're referring to is, yes, we use something called MacFUSE. So if you've seen the name Benjamin Fleischer, or MacFUSE, that was the underlying protocol or technology or driver, if you wanna call it that, that allowed, LucidLink to mount the cloud storage, the s three bucket as a conventional mount point, as a regular hard drive.
There were two issues with that. First and foremost, when you install the desktop client for LucilleLink Classic, and this is still something that you would bump into if you were to install LucilleLink Classic, you would need a reboot, which is a little annoying, for most people. It's annoying for us. I think it's annoying for pretty much everybody. But the more concerning issue is that in doing so, when you install this particular, technology, it's included in the LucidLink installer, it does require, deprecating the security settings as it relates to text extensions.
And that was a real pain point for both our customers. It was a pain point for us. And so what we did with the new LucidLink that we debuted last November is we built our own in house protocol, our own ability to mount our LucidLink file space. So the good news is that we have finally, resolved that problem. Now when you install LucidLink, the the desktop client on macOS, you're not installing MacFUSE. You're installing our own in house implementation.
It doesn't require reboot, and it does not require
Matt's certainly frozen for me, but I will say I I was making sure he was at the same But I will say we we have a large enterprise customer who works in the government sector, and they were not able to install LucidLink two point o because of what his point was there.
But they have been waiting for three point o and single sign on on three point o, which was launched a week ago, to be able to do it because it it it is enables them to use it because it doesn't have those security requirements.
Yeah.
And just to kind of follow on, you know, when talking about you know, because part of the question was, like, how is this different from, let's say, you know, kind of Samba, SMB, NFS? All those are traditional file protocols.
You know, some of in case of NFS, you know, it's decades old. You know? It's it's our founders actually developed the LucidLink, kind of core technology specifically to address the issue of accessing data over the wide area network. Traditional file protocols break down over high latency networks like the Internet. Right? So, they're just very chatty protocols, and they're designed for the the low latency, high performance of a local, area network, you know, in in technical terms. So what the LucidLink, technology provides is the ability to have that mount point that we're talking about, you know, whatever that, you know, the kind of actual operating system ability to mount a virtual file system, you know, in user space.
As far as connecting to the data source, you know, the cloud storage, we're using multiple parallel connections to directly to that cloud bucket to stream data for reads and writes.
You know, typically sixteen or more parallel connections for both uploads and downloads, reads and writes. But that ability to just maximize that wide area network bandwidth, for, you know, for kind of first this streaming data protocol, is just not something you can do with traditional file protocols, especially when you're going over something like a VPN, which ends up being the kind of typically the choke point. You've got a an on prem file server, be it SMB or NFS, and you have to VPN to make a secure private connection to that file server. And, you know, it's like you might be have a very powerful system, but now you've, kind of constrained it down to a swizzle stick. So, yeah, it's fundamentally, you know, that was kind of our core technology is addressing that issue.
Welcome back.
Sorry about that.
Something I said David had your back.
No worries.
Something I said, it's like the Gong show or somebody yanked me off.
It was funny because it did leave you leave us in suspense, though, because your last word was like, it does require, and then it cut off. Yeah. Anyways, it looks like we have one more question in the chat, and then we can wrap up for the day. That sounds good to y'all.
Sure. Yep.
Yeah. When it comes to, like, the permissions, you know, so, Edward mentioned, you know, the using a SSO identity provider to synchronize users and groups into the LucidLink, you know, kind of as kind of members of a workspace, and then you can assign those members and groups to the permissions of a specific file space at, you know, at the folder, level, like traditional, kind of file server mechanisms.
But we support, you know, kind of synchronizing those users and groups. Our permissions model, you know, currently is a member, a user, or a group, and have read only or read write permissions to a share folder, or a collection of share folders.
You can get kind of very granular of that's also the kind of the power of you can have certain groups. They can only have access to a subset of the data that you assign them, whereas admins have full readwrite access to the whole file space, and, you know, that ability to just give certain users or certain groups just the permissions that they need to do whatever work they're doing to contribute.
So, Edward, I don't know if you wanna kind of what you kind of see as far as the ability you know, organizations that want to really slice and dice, users and permission.
I mean, it it traditionally, they've come from a world where they're sort of maybe doing it through group policy or or or through just, like, traditional file space management. I think it's it's it's a much simplified way of doing it through LucidLink. And I don't mean simplified as in less powerful, but it's like going through allocating folders to users so they can see them when they go to their file space. They won't see the ones that they don't have permission to see.
So it it works differently, but it is it is it is powerful.
Yeah.
Awesome. Alright. I see Matt typing an answer to the q and a question we have in the chat. To wrap up for the day, I'm gonna launch just a two question feedback poll. We always do this at the end of our virtual events just to make sure that we're doing a great job and, sharing more about what you wanna learn. So please be honest with us. It helps us do our jobs better.
And I think I think that's it for the day. David and Edward and Matt, thank you so much for being here and sharing all of your knowledge about AWS and LucidLink and the Arch platform.
Any closing remarks that any of you wanna share?
Only from from me. If you if you wanna learn more about Arch and the way we work with LucerLink, please read out reach out to me and the team at Arch, and we can go deeper and dive into demos for you and talk about your workflows.
Do you mind if I put your email and the follow-up we send to everyone?
Please do.
Great. Yep. Cool.
David, any, closing remarks?
No. I think, you know look. We're kind of announcing, you know, this new, kind of partnership with AWS and and being on the marketplace, all the things that we're very excited about because I it's I think over the coming, years, you're gonna see a lot of really exciting developments, out of those partnerships, you know, initially, you know, with companies like, Arch. But it just it really kinda opens up, so many different workflows and so many different capabilities, and we're excited to, develop our product to be able to take advantage of all that, power and, capability.
Absolutely.
I guess I'll, close out by saying, first of all, thank you to Edward for joining us and for telling us and everybody here about Arch and the Arch platform. It's really a spectacular way for people to actually realize the original vision of the cloud. You get your data in the cloud, but you actually have to do something creatively, and here's a way to distribute, the, you know, the operating system and the creative tool really to anywhere in the world. So thank you for joining.
Delighted that we could see you in our booth at NAB, so again, thank you for that as well. And I wanna thank all of our guests, all of our attendees for joining today. So thank you for, coming to LucidLink unlocked.
We also have LucidLink magic hour episodes in the near future. We have one at the end of the month that Marcy and I will be hosting.
You. Thanks, everyone.
Welcome toLucidLink Unlocked — your inside look at how LucidLink can transform the way you work, without changing your favorite tools and workflows. Just add LucidLink.
In this session, we’ll explore how combining the Arch Platform’s scalable cloud workstations with LucidLink’s real-time collaboration platform, all backed by AWS high-performance storage, unlocks new levels of flexibility, performance and cost-efficiency for modern media teams.
LucidLink, in partnership with AWS, delivers collaborative enterprise storage, securely and at scale, for modern, work-from-anywhere enterprises. With built-in AWS S3 storage, you get unmatched performance, predictable pricing and the holy grail of cloud storage: zero egress fees. Now available on the AWS Marketplace, it’s easier than ever to add LucidLink to your workflow. No system overhauls. No procurement pains.
Joining us for this special session is Edward Churchward, Co-Founder & CTO, Arch Platform Technologies, the leading platform for workstation infrastructure for high-end creative, design, and technical workflows. Arch enables creative teams to spin up and manage powerful, networked workstations — complete with their preferred apps and tools — directly within their own AWS environment, with no DevOps overhead required.
In this session, you’ll learn:
How LucidLink, AWS and the Arch Platform work together to deliver a seamless, real-time cloud production experience that empowers global teams to collaborate at the speed of creativity.
More about LucidLink’s partnership with AWS and how to access LucidLink from the AWS Marketplace.
Answers to all your LucidLink, AWS and Arch Platform questions in a live Q&A
