At the Spa Grand Prix, Ethos had to turn a constant flow of footage into finished content while the event was still underway.
During the 2026 Grand Prix, the Belgian creative media agency produced video for social media, giant LED screens, marketing campaigns, interviews and the official aftermovie. Videographers worked across the circuit while additional footage arrived from helicopter cameras and media teams. Some raw files reached 600 GB, with editors often working against deadlines of less than an hour.
For Ethos, the storage environment had become an integral part of that workflow. The team deployed a Synology PAS7700 with 70 TB of all-flash NVMe storage, connecting up to 15 editors, media operators and data managers to the same centralised platform.
Ilias, Lead Editor, Ethos: “Synology made my life much easier. It made it possible for the client to receive deliverables faster, and for multiple editors to work on the same project at the same time. Our output is way higher and much faster.”
Centralised storage for a high-pressure workflow
The PAS7700 gave Ethos a single location for production footage. Videographers could offload files once, after which editors could access the same material without creating additional copies or waiting for transfers between systems.
Matthew Rombouts, Production Director, Ethos: “The PAS7700 centralized everything. Every videographer knows where to offload footage, and every editor knows exactly where to find it.”
The difference was particularly visible when handling large files. Uploading 100 GB of footage, which had previously taken around 40 minutes, took approximately two minutes with the PAS7700. Editors could start working much sooner, while multiple users could work from the same storage platform.
The demands may be extreme in a live media production environment, but the underlying requirement is increasingly common in enterprise environments. AI datasets, virtual machines, databases and analytics workloads all depend on fast, continuous access to data. As these workloads grow, storage performance and availability can directly affect the applications and teams relying on them.
Availability without putting production on hold
The PAS7700 uses an active-active dual-controller architecture, with both controllers operating simultaneously rather than keeping one in reserve. Redundant power, cooling and I/O paths further reduce potential points of failure.
The platform also supports IP failover and Multipath I/O across iSCSI, Fibre Channel and NVMe-oF environments. Features including SMB Persistent Handles, NFS lock recovery and rolling updates are designed to help organisations maintain access to services during maintenance or hardware issues.
For a production team like Ethos, continuous access means fewer interruptions while content is being created. In other enterprise environments, the same architecture can help keep applications and users online when infrastructure needs to be maintained or a component fails.
Performance where it matters
The PAS7700 is built around all-NVMe storage for sustained, low-latency workloads. It supports dual AMD EPYC processors, up to 1 TB of memory, 100GbE networking, Fibre Channel and NVMe over Fabrics.
In Synology’s internal testing, the platform achieved up to 2 million 4K random read IOPS and up to 30 GB/s sequential throughput. Actual performance varies depending on the testing environment, usage and configuration.
For Ethos, the practical benefit was faster access to large volumes of footage and a shared environment where several editors could work simultaneously. In other environments, the same performance characteristics can support demanding AI, virtualisation, database and analytics workloads.
Protection alongside performance
Keeping production moving also means protecting the data being produced. Ethos paired the PAS7700 with a Synology SA6400 providing 175 TB of storage. Snapshot Replication created recoverable versions of production data, helping the team recover from accidental deletion or other data loss without disrupting the workflow.
DSM Enterprise also provides security and data protection capabilities including MFA and 2FA, granular access controls, volume encryption, Self-Encrypting Drives, immutable snapshots and WriteOnce folders.
The combination gives organisations a way to bring performance, availability and protection into the same infrastructure rather than treating them as separate requirements.
For Ethos, that meant a storage environment capable of keeping up with the pace of a Grand Prix weekend, while supporting around 15 video productions per day.
The demands may have been unusually intense, but the principle applies well beyond the racetrack: when teams and applications depend on immediate access to data, the storage infrastructure needs to keep up.