Sembrar la voz films / Consultora-Lear

Background

Based in Argentina, Consultora-Lear began over 20 years ago as a family-run accounting and tax firm. Today, it has grown into a collaborative team of about ten professionals. While the firm has a long history of managing highly sensitive financial data with rock-solid IT infrastructure, they have recently embarked on a completely new venture: a film production division named Sembrar la voz films and are currently working on a self-managed documentary project. This expansion introduced a unique operational challenge: housing two completely opposite workloads under one roof—the "zero-downtime, stability-first" requirements of an accounting firm, and the "massive-data, high-load" demands of professional video production.

Challenges

As the new film project gained momentum, the company realized it needed a fundamental IT infrastructure redesign to prevent these two different worlds from colliding.

The clash of opposing requirements (Stability vs. Raw Power)
Shooting a professional documentary requires processing massive amounts of heavy raw data (S-Log3 footage). This rendering process demands immense computing power. However, if this high-load processing were executed on the same network or system handling the firm's daily accounting software, it risked causing severe delays or system crashes for the financial team.

Resource waste and management overhead
The traditional approach would be to purchase a highly expensive, dedicated physical workstation for the video editors, alongside a separate physical server for the accountants. This method, however, would waste office space, double the hardware investment, and significantly increase daily IT maintenance and electricity costs.

Solution

To solve this dilemma, Alejandro, co-owner of Consultora-Lear, designed a highly sophisticated, technically sound architecture using virtualization. Instead of buying multiple computers, he deployed a single, incredibly powerful 56-core Xeon server in the office server room, running Proxmox VE. This virtualization software logically partitions the monster machine into separate, isolated virtual rooms.

In the primary virtual environment (PVE Main), the firm runs its crucial Windows Server and Debian instances to handle daily accounting tasks. This environment connects seamlessly to a QNAP TS-230 for highly secure and stable data storage. Completely isolated from this is PVE Filming, a dedicated virtual server specifically built to process raw S-Log3 footage. This video-centric environment is paired with a QNAP TS-464. By connecting an ingest laptop directly to the TS-464 NAS via Ethernet, the team achieves the blazing-fast transfer speeds necessary to handle massive video files without ever touching the accounting network.

Result

By embracing virtualization and intelligent storage allocation rather than simply buying more hardware, the firm achieved a perfect balance of absolute business security and creative agility.

Absolute stability with zero impact on the main system
No matter how intensely "PVE Filming" renders heavy S-Log3 video files, the resources are strictly separated. The neighboring virtual environment hosting the accounting Windows Server experiences zero performance degradation. Content creators can push the system to its limits, while accountants enjoy uninterrupted access to their client data.

Cost reduction and space efficiency through consolidation
By centralizing their computing power into one 56-core server and relying on QNAP NAS for specialized storage roles, the firm avoided the clutter and expense of multiple physical PCs. This streamlined approach minimizes hardware investments, reduces footprint, and simplifies IT management.

Future-proof scalability
The combination of Proxmox and QNAP provides incredible flexibility for future growth. While the firm currently runs services like Nginx via Docker on the Proxmox side, the architecture is primed to easily shift managed content directly onto the QNAP ecosystem or deploy new Debian instances as the business expands.