In what many people appreciate was the Olympics we all needed to have to lift our spirits in such challenging times, we saw the best of the best compete and win. Behind the scenes the same could be said of some of the broadcast services providers such as Gravity Media who needed an innovative storage solution for this year's Olympic Games and for that they turned to Digistor and Infortrend.
Gravity Media's Head of Technology, Adrian Jenner explained, "We have a good history with Digistor and mentioned our Olympics requirement to them and our workflow team worked with the Digistor engineering team to spec up a suitable storage solution."
Gravity's Requirements
Gravity specified requirements that included high transactional and high throughput bandwidth for simultaneous recording of mezzanine compressed streams and processing of growing files. In essence, they required a centralised high-performance storage system to act as the hub for their media workflow on the Olympics. The system needed to take feeds from multiple EVS systems and make these files available to multiple post production systems. It also needed to support more than 40 production staff that needed to browse content.
Digistor Solution
Digistor proposed a dual redundant Infortrend GS4000 NAS system to deliver the high performance and capacity requirements. This was further refined with the help of Gravity's engineers and combined, they settled on an 84 drive system which offered 1.3PB of RAW capacity and just over 1PB usable.
The system was pre-built (see video below) and performance tested at Digistor HQ in Artarmon. Digistor then provided the necessary training to the Gravity engineers prior to the system being shipped to Gravity's Olympic Production Hub in Melbourne.
Adrian added, "Using 16TB NL SAS drives and Infortrend's high density enclosures, the solution was relatively compact at only 8RU. For this application, we used quad 10Gb connections from each of the redundant RAID controllers to provide the necessary bandwidth and redundancy. The GS4000 also supports 25Gb and 40Gb connections and could scale to almost 900 drives and multiple PBs if required."
The system was in operation 24 hours a day for the Olympics and then continued to be used in the same manner for the Paralympics without a single issue — a fact that was not lost on Adrian.
"The Infortrend solution didn't miss a beat, it easily covered a full load-test of worst-case scenarios then proved its reliability through six weeks of solid operational use."
Gravity Media's Head of Technology, Adrian Jenner
He continued, "The Infortrend solution didn't miss a beat, it easily covered a full load-test of worst-case scenarios then proved its reliability through six weeks of solid operational use. This is particularly impressive as, after the initial commissioning and RAID build, the Infortrend solution was virtually plug and play to setup for the project. I have to mention the fact that Digistor were key in the initial commissioning phase and training of the systems features, as these were major advantages for us."
Throughout the Olympics and Paralympics the Infortrend solution served as the primary storage for all of Gravity's recorded media in both high res and low res formats, it also served as the central data pool for on-demand serving media to clients for the duration of the project. This was a serious storage solution with, some might say, exceptional Olympic-style performance.
"We were all very happy with the level of service and support from the Digistor team and look forward to working with them again in the future."
Adrian Jenner concluded, "The Infortrend solution supplied by Digistor exceeded all performance expectations, and never missed a beat. The project was never limited by the resources or bandwidth of the Infortrend. Being able to hand Digistor a spec and have them provide the best proposals without having to perform additional research and development was a massive time saver for us. We were all very happy with the level of service and support from the Digistor team and look forward to working with them again in the future."