Touchvision Digital Media Solutions is proud to offer EMC Isilon’s innovative, fifth-generation storage solutions that speed access to critical business information, offering an efficient, easy-to-manage storage infrastructure that reduces operational expenditure and allows seamless growth of storage.
According to Touchvision’s Leigh Pearson, EMC Corporation recently announced that Associated Press (AP) has deployed EMC Isilon scale-out NAS, to support the big data demands of its high definition (HD) video production and archive workflows.
By implementing a single Isilon system and software, AP has boosted the performance of copy and transfer rates, streamlined storage management, improved reliability, and lowered its video archive storage costs, without compromising on any of these dimensions. Although Isilon was initially deployed specifically for AP’s video editing workflow, the news organisation soon began using Isilon to archive content as well, with significant cost savings.
As newsgathering organisations continued transitioning to HD video in 2011, AP needed to upgrade its standard definition (SD) video content offerings. However, the tape-based video archival system AP had deployed for SD was not up to the task of handling more performance-intensive HD content. The tape system had a high per-terabyte cost, sluggish access and transfer rates, and failed 10% to 15% of the time. In addition, every few years due to tape technology changes, organisations had to convert existing tapes to make them compatible with the latest standards.
Having implemented Isilon for its video editing workflow, AP expanded its use into video archiving as part of a complete video infrastructure revamp to support the HD video upgrade, from camcorders to servers to storage.
AP deployed Isilon NL-Series and X-Series platform nodes in its New Jersey and London data centres to support it’s video production and archival system.
The Isilon OneFS operating system, and SmartPools and SmartConnect software enable AP to aggregate all storage assets into one pool, assign appropriate levels of service to individual users, and easily perform other storage management tasks.
“This is great news,’ says Pearson, “and it is apparent that South African media companies are tracking their European and American counterparts very closely as they too need to make the transition from tape based archives and workflows to totally digital environments.’
