Canadian Cable Public Affairs Channel Upgrades DDN SFA

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that the Cable Public Affairs Channel (CPAC) in Canada has deployed DDN SFA12K and DDN WOS Object Storage to fuel its delivery of public affairs content to more than 11 million homes via cable, satellite and wireless distribution and via 24/7 web streaming.

As Canada’s only privately-owned, commercial free and bilingual non-profit television service, CPAC offers viewers insight and analysis of the people, politics and events shaping Canadian public policy.

With up to 80 hours of new content ingested daily and over 30,000 hours of archived content on its website, CPAC required performance storage to address data-intensive content ingest, editing, production and distribution needs. The organization also needed a scalable, real-time archive for one petabyte of high-resolution programming. Faced with escalating data growth, CPAC unified its production storage and active archive requirements with an end-to-end solution from DDN, encompassing both a powerful file-based SAN and flexible object storage. With DDN, CPAC can meet increasing requirements for easily and economically producing, storing, retaining and recovering more than a petabyte of important political media content.

“With DDN’s SFA12K and WOS, we were able to increase our production and active archive usable capacity to more than 1PB while lowering costs,” says Eitan Weisz, senior manager of technical operations, CPAC. “DDN played a key role in getting our first, file-based SAN off the ground and in integrating storage with our media management system. Now we have a great opportunity to add IT backup and DR for a complete end-to-end architecture fueled by DDN.“

CPAC focuses on progressive solutions to support the simultaneous delivery of up to 10 live streams of public affairs programming. Unlike traditional broadcast coverage, much of CPAC’s long-form programming requires video rendering that takes hours and can overburden storage resources. Additionally, CPAC retains its content in perpetuity and continues to digitize older tapes to add to its archive.

For that reason, the organization has relied on DDN’s SFA platform for years, which led to the recent SFA12K upgrade to better accommodate daily production needs while still integrating with its Dalet media management system and editing workflows, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer. By adding WOS platform to its SFA solution, CPAC was able to replace an expensive and hard-to-manage legacy robotic tape library with a reliable, easy-to-use active archive for about the same amount of money it paid for approximately two years of annual support fees for the library and HSM software.

CPAC was able to take advantage of DDN’s ObjectAssur technology in WOS to mirror content between two WOS appliances for backup and DR purposes. The company also plans to use WOS for IT backup and is exploring the opportunity to render videos directly from WOS for a production boost. Thanks to scalability on the WOS platform, CPAC can archive and share hundreds of thousands of hours of broadcast content. Moreover, the organization leverages elevated levels of data availability and durability with low storage overhead to achieve a positive ROI within approximately one year.