A fast-growing military media brand needed shared storage and asset management infrastructure — but didn't have the internal expertise to evaluate a fragmented vendor market. The engagement delivered a clear recommendation in under a week.
We Are The Mighty (WATM) was a Los Angeles-based digital media company focused on military and veteran content. At its peak, the brand operated a high-volume video production operation serving a large and engaged online audience across YouTube and social platforms.
The team was producing content at a pace that had outgrown their existing infrastructure. Individual workstations, disconnected storage, and manual file transfer workflows were creating friction, slowing post-production, and creating real risk of asset loss.
They needed a shared storage system with asset management — but the vendor landscape was fragmented, pricing was opaque, and the internal team didn't have the time or expertise to evaluate it properly.
The challenge wasn't finding storage. The challenge was making a confident decision in a market designed to confuse buyers.
The shared storage market for video production spans a wide range — from enterprise systems with bundled asset management priced at $60K+ to bare-metal commodity storage with no local support. Without a framework for comparison, every vendor conversation produces a different set of claims.
List prices rarely reflect actual project costs. Installation, rack enclosures, service contracts, and asset management licensing can add 20–40% to a quoted system price. WATM needed someone who could normalize these variables across vendors.
The production team knew what they needed operationally — fast access, reliable backup, searchable assets — but didn't have the technical background to evaluate storage architecture, network topology, or vendor viability. They needed a translator.
A structured evaluation process designed to produce a decision — not a list of options.
Conducted 30–45 minute discovery calls with four shared storage vendors and one asset management platform. Each call followed the same evaluation framework to ensure comparable data across vendors.
Vendors were assessed across local support presence, total cost of ownership, scalability for projected content volume, integration with existing post-production workflows, and implementation complexity.
Identified three distinct market tiers: enterprise solutions with bundled asset management (over-engineered for WATM's needs), commodity bare-metal storage (insufficient support and integration), and a mid-market 'sweet spot' offering the right balance of capability, support, and cost.
Rather than presenting a list of options and leaving the decision to the client, delivered a specific two-quote recommendation to a single preferred vendor — with a written rationale for the decision and explicit reasoning for eliminating the alternatives.
The recommendation included a flag for the next infrastructure decision point: workstation upgrades. Timing those upgrades in coordination with storage implementation would affect hardware compatibility and total investment. The client left with a clear path, not just a purchase decision.
WATM received a clear, written recommendation — not a spreadsheet of options — within one week of the engagement beginning.
The value of this engagement wasn't the storage recommendation itself — it was the elimination of decision paralysis. WATM's production team could have spent weeks in vendor conversations, received conflicting proposals, and still not known which system was right for their workflow.
What they got instead was a structured process, a clear decision, and a path forward. That's what infrastructure consulting is supposed to deliver.
A note on timing: This engagement was completed in 2016. The shared storage vendor landscape has changed significantly since then — specific products, pricing, and some of the vendors referenced in the original deliverable have evolved or been discontinued. The methodology described here — structured vendor evaluation, a clear decision framework, and a single written recommendation — is the same approach DVC uses today. The names and numbers have changed. The problem hasn't.
Whether it's storage infrastructure, vendor selection, workflow design, or team structure — if you're dealing with complexity and need a clear path forward, that's exactly what DVC is built to deliver.