DataDirect Networks

Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, a leading provider of state-of-the-art services and technologies for the global digital media and entertainment industry, faced several challenges. The company was experiencing an increasing demand to access and share high-resolution post-production workflow content on a global scale. The massive storage requirements and rapid growth created a surge of Big Data. The company's legacy tape-based archives proved insufficient in meeting fast turnaround and high-performance throughput expectations. Deluxe Creative Services sought an improved architectural underpinning that would enable selectively replicating data globally for easy and fast access by remote users. The company's traditional model of local SAN storage wouldn't scale out to a global footprint. Using NAS storage to move content from New York to London also would be too slow, leading to performance bottlenecks.

Anyang City Hall in South Korea launched a major initiative to tackle urban street crime, slash traffic congestion, and beef up the city’s disaster response capabilities. The first step was to combine the city’s crime prevention and disaster management systems into a single infrastructure, deployed and managed in the city’s brand new Integrated Operations Briefing room. The challenge was to deploy a massive intelligent video surveillance system across Anyang’s entire 23-square-mile metropolitan area, with hundreds of high-definition digital video cameras linked to scores of servers running network video recording software and sophisticated pattern recognition analytics. The system links all cameras to the video management infrastructure in the Integrated Operations Briefing room at Anyang Police Department headquarters, complementing and enhancing the city’s police presence and rapid response capabilities. Anyang City Hall uses the same surveillance infrastructure for traffic management and forest fire prevention.

Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment (MLSE) wanted to create a central media repository to store and archive all of its digital broadcasting workflow, from production and ingest through editing, post-production and play-out. The storage system needed to support a wide variety of devices and software packages, including ingest devices, editing stations running Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid, as well as play-out servers from Harris. The solution also needed to integrate with a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution which would be implemented during the second phase of the project. The solution not only needed to enable full connectivity and content sharing between heterogeneous systems, but allow them to work simultaneously, at full speed, without dropping frames or causing delays.

Nice Shoes, a full-service, artist-driven design, animation, visual effects and color grading studio, was facing challenges due to the explosive growth of resolutions, file sizes and performance requirements. The company was dealing with tight deadlines, complex workflows and multiple stakeholders. Their previous storage system was inefficient, leading to wasted creative time, unpredictable performance, and high cost and complexity of managing multiple systems. The company was also dealing with the increasing demand to deliver content in multiple formats to multiple devices, which traditional storage systems were unable to handle effectively.

Fox Network’s Engineering & Operations team was tasked with designing a file-based workflow solution for SPEED, specifically addressing the requirements to move from SD to HD content throughout the process, ingesting content directly into the Storage Area Network (SAN), creating low-res copies for easy editing, production and advanced editing, supporting Dalet transfers to and from video servers – while enabling 75 concurrent Dalet users to go about their everyday tasks, from logging content to rundown preparation. The team quickly began to leverage their experience from other, similar, projects and turned to high performance DDN® storage and Dalet for the key workflow components. The biggest challenge was timing – only a few weeks after signing the PO the entire system had to be on air in a brand new, purpose-built, 55,000 square foot facility.

WRN Broadcast, an international broadcast managed services company, was experiencing a 30% year-on-year growth. However, their underpowered storage was running slower than many of the systems accessing it, which was hurting productivity. They needed to replace their existing storage solution with a more flexible, scalable, and secure infrastructure. The company had grown 30% year-on-year, over the last two years alone, and it more than doubled the number of television channels that it serves. In order to facilitate such rapid growth, and also plan for future expansion, WRN Broadcast needed to replace its existing storage solution with something more flexible, scalable, and absolutely secure, with an important additional criterion of being a leader in its field to match WRN Broadcast’s own standards of excellence.

Fox Network’s Engineering & Operations team was tasked with designing a file-based workflow solution for SPEED, specifically addressing the requirements to move from SD to HD content throughout the process, ingesting content directly into the Storage Area Network (SAN), creating low-res copies for easy editing, production and advanced editing, supporting Dalet transfers to and from video servers – while enabling 75 concurrent Dalet users to go about their everyday tasks, from logging content to rundown preparation. The team quickly began to leverage their experience from other, similar, projects and turned to high performance DDN® storage and Dalet for the key workflow components. The biggest challenge was timing – only a few weeks after signing the PO the entire system had to be on air in a brand new, purpose-built, 55,000 square foot facility.

Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec, Canada's largest university-based center for the study of film animation, film production, and film studies, faced several challenges. The school needed to update its aging workflows, moving from 90% film-oriented workflows to a 99% digital landscape. The technical support team was very limited in staffing. Multiple buildings on campus needed connectivity with third-party switches. Different client operating systems were attached to a single pool of storage.

Wroclaw Centre for Networking and Supercomputing (WCSS) was facing challenges in supporting the processing and collection of increasingly large, complex, data-intensive scientific weather and geographic models. The temporary or scratch storage was required to address data growth across diverse scientific projects. The center needed to deliver access and capacity to support the work of over 3,000 scientists and researchers. There was an escalating need to address mixed workloads across a complicated, heterogeneous ecosystem of hardware and applications.

MLB Network, a 24/7 TV network for baseball fans, was facing challenges in managing its vast baseball video archive. The network required a high-performance disk cache to support tape migration for the archive while accommodating 7,000 hours of new content ingested weekly. They also needed to simplify complex, concurrent workflows to ensure seamless support for up to 40 post-production jobs concurrently. The network was also looking for a technology that could suit the needs of two sports TV networks. The immediate challenge was moving LTO-4 content into a disk cache and then rewriting that content onto T10KD tapes, while simultaneously recording and archiving new footage onto the T10KD platform.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Center in Perth, Western Australia, is one of the most powerful facilities in the Southern Hemisphere. It supports scientific breakthroughs in radio astronomy, energy resources, and engineering. At any given point, more than a thousand scientists rely on Pawsey’s state-of-the-art facilities to conduct data-intensive research, complex simulations, and advanced visualizations. The Center also plays a pivotal role in the trailblazing Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project, which focuses on building a next-generation radio telescope that will be more sensitive and powerful than today’s most advanced telescopes to survey the universe with incredible depth and speed. The SKA project will generate massive amounts of data from thousands of connected antennae, giving astronomers unprecedented insights into the formation of the universe. To support this ground-breaking research, Pawsey must provide scientists around the world with easy access to high-end computing platforms and resilient, scalable storage.