When you walk into George Blood LP’s facility in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, it feels like stepping into both a high-tech lab and a living museum. Walls lined with equipment spanning decades of media history tell the story of a company that says “yes” to any preservation challenge. From rare audio formats to 4K film, George Blood LP has built a reputation for solving problems others can’t.
That relentless approach has fueled rapid growth. What started as an audio preservation shop has expanded into large-scale film and video digitization, serving clients as varied as national broadcasters, universities, cultural foundations, and the Library of Congress. Over the last decade, workloads have multiplied several times over, pushing the company’s infrastructure to its limits.
Customer: George Blood LP (Fort Washington, PA)
Industry: Media preservation and digitization (audio, video, film, data)
Challenge: Legacy SAN could not sustain increasing throughput demands, leading to dropped frames, daily bottlenecks, and end-of-life hardware.
Solution: Deployment of EditShare Ultimate NVMe storage nodes
Results:
- Daily ingest capacity increased to 30–50 TB, including 2K and 4K film scans
- 16 GB/s sustained writes achieved in stress testing
- No bottlenecks across ingest, rendering, or delivery workflows
- Enabled growth without sacrificing high-fidelity restoration quality
Hitting the Wall with Legacy Storage
For years, George Blood LP relied on a 300TB spinning disk SAN connected via a mix of fiber and SMB protocols. As demand grew, throughput requirements ballooned from 8–10 terabytes a day to as much as 50. Multiple film scanners, video ingest rooms, rendering, QC, and delivery workflows all competed for bandwidth. The result: dropped frames, bottlenecks, and engineers fighting the system instead of focusing on the work.
“Our existing storage just couldn’t sustain what we were asking of it,” recalled Jared Gibson, Video Team Lead at George Blood LP. “We needed speed, stability, and capacity to keep growing.”
A Partner-Led Search for a New Backbone
Working with Key Code Media, a nationwide systems integrator which has supported George Blood for many years. George Blood LP evaluated multiple storage vendors. Sustained high-speed ingest, heavy simultaneous reads/writes, and reliability across dozens of connected clients were non-negotiable.
Key Code Media recommended EditShare, and testing quickly proved it was the right fit. Verified by LaserGraphics as the only storage capable of handling its scanners’ performance requirements, EditShare provided the reliability and throughput George Blood LP needed.
Performance That Changed Everything
From the moment the EditShare Ultimate NVMe nodes went live, the results were clear. “We pushed the system as hard as we could, and we couldn’t break it,” said Gibson. “In stress tests we sustained 16 gigabytes per second in writes, well above our expectations. With our previous SAN, we were constantly dropping frames and struggling to keep up. With EditShare, the bottlenecks are gone.”
The system now supports massive daily ingest across multiple 2K and 4K film scanners, high-volume video rooms, rendering, QC, and delivery processes, all without faltering. Stress tests with more than 80 clients confirmed stability far beyond normal workloads, providing headroom for years of continued growth.
Enabling Growth Without Compromise
The performance leap has unlocked a new level of capability. George Blood LP can now sustain high-volume digitization while maintaining the precision restoration quality that made their name. “I’m just so enamored by the performance of the storage,” said Jared Gibson. “It’s brought so much relief to the team, our growth and our hardware are now in sync and that changes everything.”
George Blood’s unique market position combines the ability to handle bulk digitization 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 we needed to meet the demand.”
About George Blood LP
George Blood LP is a leading provider of preservation and digitization services, specializing in audio, video, film, and data. With clients worldwide, the company is trusted by major broadcasters, universities, government agencies, and cultural institutions to safeguard irreplaceable media. Learn more at www.georgeblood.com.gh a Storage DNA MAM, that sits on top of our whole environment, and bring those assets back down again and deep archive on LTO on completion of a project. Editshare offers us better workflows with less human time and more automation.”
“We can take on a semi-truck of media and still deliver at the highest quality.”
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