In any language, StorNext supports TV network success

StorNext Helps Russian TV Network with Multi-Language Collaboration

With its expansive new broadcast and production center in Moscow, RT knew that collaboration across its three language-specific channels would require a high-speed, state-of-the-art storage management solution. The answer was Quantum’s StorNext® end-to-end content workflow management software and storage appliances. The result: Faster access to new data and shared workflow capability. 

Studio Upgrade Brings Complexity

International television news network RT relocated to a new 28,000-square-meter operations center designed to support its round-the-clock international television stations, video production facilities, and a rapidly expanding new-media program. The challenge: The center needed to support collaboration through shared ingest and archive capability for all of the media professionals in three distinct operations for RT’s English, Spanish, and Arabic language programming.

RT looked to broadcast specialist integrator OKNO-TV to make recommendations that would support its current needs and accommodate growth. The scale of the operation was very large—it was designed for six studios and up to eight simultaneous outgoing HD feeds. The system today manages over 40,000 hours of programming and almost a petabyte of digital content.

One of the most challenging requirements for this large deployment was choosing a workflow solution that could support all of RT’s tools and provide collaborative workflow for all three separate-language operations. After looking at alternatives from multiple vendors, OKNO-TV and RT selected Quantum’s StorNext. Explains Mikhail Kalanchekaev, OKNO-TV, “The key piece to supporting the system is Quantum’s StorNext technology—it provides an integrated storage infrastructure that supports all of the RT tools, provides fast easy sharing between groups, gives consistent, high-speed transfer rates, and is a proven, reliable solution. Best of all, it does its work in the background so the production teams can think about their work, not the storage that makes it possible.”

Benefits: Central Repository, Automated Data Movement

Under the new system, all content is initially ingested into a central storage pool by 24 servers. Whenever material is needed by one of the three language-specific sites, it is automatically transferred from the central location to the appropriate studio’s work area.

When programming is completed, StorNext automatically moves data back to the central pool for archiving. Metadata and proxies from the common resource are shared between all of the language sites, making it easy for any of the separate operations to search the archive and download content.

A major advantage of the StorNext File System is that it allows the highest performance ingest, transfer, and transcoding operations to be carried out over Fibre Channel links. Tasks suitable for lower performance (metadata transfer and some non-linear editing tasks, for example) use cost-reducing StorNext LAN clients over Ethernet.

“StorNext allows a single interface to deliver the highest possible performance whenever it is
needed, and at the same time to use lower cost links for the less bandwidth-intensive operations,”
says Alexander Ozersky, Head of Broadcast IT Support for RT. “StorNext’s broad support for
different vendors means that RT can easily change editing, storage, or switch vendors in the future
to control costs.”